Thursday, February 12, 2009

Malayalam Collation is now in glibc upstream

yesterday Ulrich upstreamed ml_IN collation patch

2008 nice year of Indic computing as we started targeting collation for Indic Languages in glibc,
starting point was Ulrich Drepper's India visit for foss.in 2008, he pointed out in his speech still there lots of work to do for Indic Languages in glibc
for collation and iconv
I started some work initially, studied already implemented things such that collation tables for ta_IN and as_IN, community event Indic Mashup in Pune helped lot, in that event almost all Languages LM were present and got a good input to start work

started collation with Devanagari mostly used script in India, then one bye one,
GUJARATI
TELUGU
GURUMUKHI
KANNADA
SINHALA
MALAYALAM

we have got a good community, they really worked very fast for this, for Sinhala and Malayalam harshula and santhosh completely wrote collation table i just reviewed and tested them.

so its really nice thing happen for Indic languages

now
we can see all menus for particular languages in sorted order,
also we can easily sort any long list using sort function provided by glibc and quickly search required item,
also like the way we search our required file in huge docs folder pressing initials of name, same thing now we can do for our language(i was missing that lot)

Fedora 10 already has support for most of the collation, now Fedora 11 will have support for Malayalam Collation also

collation table for above languages/script are available at glibc upstream

the only one remaining now is Bengali collation, Bug
hope so things for that also get sorted quickly and we can say now Linux support sorting for all Indic Languages :)

thanks to all contributed in this and special thanks to Ulrich for all support :)
cheers