It would be great if i could switch SU to a custumers language wen i have him/her on the phone while he is trying to model something.
That way there would only have to be one SU version per OS on the download page.
+1
Interesting thought! I wonder what proportion of SU goes into the language-specific strings vs the core code. Having all languages in a single package could enormously bloat the size of SU unless that fraction is small!
It can never make a big difference, i am using a genealogy program that’s only 9 MB big and i can switch in less than a second to one of the many languages.
Maybe there should be something like the SU-extensions for each language, so you could choose witch one’s to load at startup.
In most contexts strings are negligible in size. Resources such as images and models usually eat up most space.
I agree that images typically are larger than code. I don’t see why models are relevant when discussing the size of the SU code, though. They aren’t distributed as part of the package.
To introduce a sample fact into the discussion, in a recent extension that John McClenahan and I wrote we provided translations to all eight of the non-Asian languages that SU supports (neither of us has even a smattering of Asian language ability and nobody offered to contribute translations). The total body of the Ruby code is 92KB, and the translated language support totals 356KB! Admittedly we did not try to optimize the implementation and the translation data could be shrunk considerably by various techniques. But even unoptimized, no single language’s data was more than about half the size of the code.
I offer this concrete fact to underscore that without actually determining what part of the SU package consists of language strings, we don’t have a basis to say whether including all translations would bloat the package. That’s why I used the phrases “I wonder” and “unless”.