Jonathan Walther writes: > No. Consider the case of America and Canada. They share 5 > timezones between them, but differ in the default dictionaries that > are appropriate. Too much work for too little gain. However, if > you make a nice patch and submit it to the maintainer of the > "dictionary" package, perhaps it will get in.
Fair enough; probably the timezone is the wrong place to start. But given a bit of geographic information, you can guess sensible defaults or in some cases fixed values for a number of things: * timezone * locale settings (language, number formats, currency, ...) * dictionary packages to install * usenet hierarchies to feed (de.* in German-speaking places, etc.) * ISPs that one might want to connect to * choice of dialup software/hardware (e.g. UUCP is more popular in some places than others, ditto ISDN, some places have cable modems and others don't, ...) * mirror site to use for updates (or even for the initial install, for users with cheap bandwidth) * whether to offer certain software for install (crypto is still illegal in some countries, other countries may have patent problems with some software, &c). Some of these are probably less useful to think about than others. However I'm sure there's lots of other things that vary in a fairly predictable fashion from place to place. ttfn/rjk
