illumos gets global


I just pushed a major set of changes:

8 libc locale work needs updated license files
223 libc needs multibyte locale support for collation
225 libc locale binary files should be in native byte order
309 populate initial locales for illumos

As a result, illumos has gained base support for some 157 different locales, spanning 67 languages and 116 different territories. This includes nearly all the major languages of the world -- missing are Serbian, Javanese, Farsi, Malaysian, Burmese, and some languages spoken in central and west Africa. (Some of these will be very easy for someone else to add... let me know if you want one of these and are willing to do the work.)

The support for these locales includes full POSIX compliant collating support, which was completely absent in illumos before this integration.

Also, included, is a new open source implementation of localedef(1). To my knowledge, this new implementation is the only non-GNU version of localedef that is fully open, and this version is more fully functional than the GNU version. (The GNU localedef lacks full support for collation data.)

Other notes: this is only the base support for these locales. This will for example give localized output from "date". There is quite a lot of additional effort required to fully localize an illumos system, including support for input methods, fonts, and message catalogs for all the various applications. However, with this base support, it makes doing that other work much more practical.

This integration adds nearly 2 million lines to illumos, although far and away the vast majority of it is in the form of data from Unicode and the CLDR (common locale data repository). The ability to import data directly from these sources is the new code that I've written, including a major overhaul of the underlying ctype and collation support in libc to properly support multibyte locales.

Its my belief that with this integration, one of the biggest feature gaps between illumos and Solaris is closed.

Comments

Unknown said…
Thanks for doing this. I hope I can contribute sometime soon.
October 9, 2010 at 4:19 PM
Unknown said…
Keep up the good work!
October 13, 2010 at 2:39 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

An important milestone

Yesterday, with very little fanfare, illumos passed an important milestone. This milestone was the integration of  195 Need replacement for nfs/lockd+klm This is work that I originally tasked Gordon Ross and Dan Kruchinin to work while we were colleagues at  Nexenta .  Gordon started the work, picking up bits from FreeBSD as a starting point and gluing it to the illumos entry points.  Dan continued with it, and fleshed out a lot of the skeleton that Gordon had started.  It was subsequently picked up by the engineers at Delphix , and -- after some important bug fixing work was completed -- was integrated into their product quite some time ago -- reportedly its been stable since December in their product. The reason this is such an important milestone, is two fold: First, this represents a substantial collaborative effort, involving contributions from parties across several organizational boundaries.  The level of collaboration achieved here is a w...
Read more

GNU grep - A Cautionary Tale About GPLv3

My company, DEY Storage Systems , is in the process of creating a new product around the illumos operating system.  As you might imagine, this product includes a variety of open and proprietary source code.  The product itself is not delivered as a separate executable, but as a complete product.  We don't permit our customers to crack it open, both from the sense of protecting our IP, but also to protect our support and release engineering organizations -- our software releases consist only of a single file and we don't supply tools or source for other parties to modify that file. One of the pieces that we wanted to integrate into the tree is an excellent little piece of software called Zookeeper , produced by the Apache organization.  Like illumos, Zookeeper has a nice non-viral copyleft license, which makes it nice for integration into our product. However, I discovered that as part of our integration, one of my engineers had decided to integrate GNU grep. ...
Read more

The Hand May Be Forced

Well, as you may have read , Oracle has decided that at some point very soon, we're going to lose normal regular access to the source code for OS/Net. (I.e. the Solaris kernel and supporting programs.) While I would have vastly preferred for Illumos to have a cooperative and collaborative relationship with Oracle , it appears that Oracle doesn't value this. In fact, the exact words were from the management at Oracle were as follows: Solaris is not something we outsource to others, it is not the assembly of someone else’s technology, and it is not a sustaining-only product. While I understand the need to own the technology, there are few things that could be stated that show a stronger NIH attitude than this. Its unlikely that there will ever be a way for Oracle and the greater community to have a collaborative relationship. This is a dark day for OpenSolaris -- its effectively dead now. (Its parent, Solaris, lives on however.) How unfortunate. For Oracle that is. Because...
Read more