Seth Bindernagel points to the list thread which asks about “how Mozilla chooses languages to ship”. He goes on to write “The Mozilla process is not perfect, but we hold high standards of perfection.  We choose to ship our official, non language-pack locales only when they are ready as a bug-free experience for the end-user.”

The Bengali (India) or bn_IN locale has seen some aspects of the drive for perfection. These are amply documented at bug 398992. If one trawls through the length of that particular bug the aspect that would stand out is the particular attention has gone towards ensuring that as much as possible local language / culture references are taken care of. In some aspects, sites were painstakingly asked about whether they would like to be listed, contacts from the Indian versions of the sites repeatedly poked to ACK their presence. Needless to say, bn_IN isn’t part of the shipped set of languages for Firefox 3. It is partly due to the process phase where one has to productize it for FF2 and then only move on to FF3. And we have been stuck at FF2 for ages now.
In fact, this blog shows that the FF3 downloads of international locales doesn’t have any significant amount of Indic locale downloads. Would this piece of statistic have an impact on Mozilla’s focus and attention to detail when it comes to Indic locales ? I really don’t know. And, would appreciate a straight answer.

However, I see this comment and without a response from Mozilla I am inclined to infer that the drive for perfection is not universal across locales.  For bn_IN I am sure that both Runa and me would have liked to have this choice. And it was the team at Mozilla who should have informed of this choice being available.