Thai issue for 2.0 timeframe

I've talked with Axel Hecht and he think the appropriate group should
be .general, not .18n.

At present, Thai support in Mozilla products is lacking [1]. Since Thai
is one of major Asian language (65M speakers), this make us miss the
oppotunity to promote use of Firefox/Thunderbird in Thailand. Since we
have both i18n technical problems and Mozilla policy problems so that
I'll address them here.

Let me introduce Thai writing system in brief. Thai has no space
between words, just between sentences only and it needs extra
library/dictionary to handle line-breaking problem. Browser without
line-breaking features is neary unusable for Thai people and this adds
more complexity to i18n/l10n level than tranlation.

I separate Thai i18n/l10n problems into two main issues:
- Translation
- Line-breaking and other technical i18n issues

Thai Translation of Firefox and Thunderbird are done and distributed
widely among Thai users. They are in process to commit on Mozilla.org
CVS.

There are many attempt to solve Thai line-breaking and several patches
available [3]. Unfortunately due to infrastructure limitation, we don't
have a final solution which works all platform. Current workaround is
Thai Community Edition [2] which patched by using extra library such as
ICU [4][5].

The downside of Community Edition is developer needs to rebuild
everytime new version is released. The other downside is public
awareness that Thai Community Edition exists. Some Thai people may hear
about Firefox coolness and directly to grab official build and discover
there can't handle line-breaking.

The sustain solution for this problem is waiting for infrastructure
change by using Cairo for rendering. This change will coming in Firefox
3.0, so we will miss this in 2.0 timeframe.

I propose some idea for this problem
- In long term, delay official Thai localization build (in [1]) until
we solve line-breaking problem in trunk
- In short term, use unofficial or Community Edition builds instead but
point to these build clearly on any related Mozilla webpages. Now we
have central Firefox Thai site [6] that links to all available builds
but I think host this page on Mozilla web site is better.

Can this possible for Mozilla process?

Isriya Paireepairit

[1] http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/all.html
[2] http://www.osdev.co.th/firefox/ (in Thai
[3] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7969
[4] http://icu.sourceforge.net/
[5] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=299324
[6] http://linux.thai.net/plone/TLWG/firefox-thai (in Thai)

Thai tracking bug is https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=65896