Re: Bug#160284: ITP: po-debconf -- Manage translated Debconf templates files with gettext
To libtext-iconv-perl maintainer: Steve, does libtext-iconv-perl in fact
need the locales package to work?
On Wed, Sep 11, 2002 at 06:55:48PM +0900, Tomohiro KUBOTA wrote:
> However, I have one concern. Debconf is one of softwares which is
> used in early stage of Debian installation. Thus, Debconf should
> not depend on many/large packages/data.
>
> Encoding conversion is a relatively heavy process. I mean, collection
> of conversion tables is large.
>
> I don't know if iconv (I can use "libtext-iconv-perl" package) or
> encoding conversion in gettext work well without "locales" package
> or not. Do you have any idea?
>
> If it *needs*, it means that Debconf cannot use encoding conversion
> in small systems or early stage of installation. Even in such cases,
> Debconf should work fairly good in popular locales (like ISO-8859-15
> for French and EUC-JP for Japanese).
>
> If it *doesn't need*, we can freely design new Debconf to use iconv
> or gettext.
If the package really needs locales, then I guess we have the following
solution:
since anyone except those who use "C" locale in fact need "locales"
package to use their national locale, we can have debconf use
libtext-iconv-perl _conditionally_ only if recoding is needed (i.e. user
uses non-UTF-8-compatible locale, which probably means anything other
than UTF8 itself or "C" locale").
This way debconf could only recommend or suggest locales (and
libtext-iconv-perl), but anyone using legacy charset locale (i.e.
iso-*, EUC-JP, ...) wold in fact need locales anyway.
One more benefit is we move UT8 transition forward :-)
Of course we would still need to force libtext-iconv-perl and locales
retrevial and installation before the reboot for people who choose a
non-"C" locale.
Marcin
--
Marcin Owsiany <porridge@debian.org> http://marcin.owsiany.pl/
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