Christian Perrier wrote:
The keyboard layout will, however, remain preseedable distinctly as the code for handling locales and keyboard layouts is very separate code....making things too much interdependent is probably not a good long-term idea...
That's the point.Assuming much seems to be convenient for mainstream, but gets inconvenient in case of special needs. E.g. I want to have English as language for installation, administration, messages and man, as this has advantages to find similar problems or describe them in newsgroups, forums and bug trackers. Keyboard is German, location is Austria (but can change in case of a notebook), encoding should be UTF-8.
Developers should always keep in mind, that different users can exist on one system, that one user can have different roles, wants to use more than one language at the same time etc.
Thus locales should always be choosable and reconfigurable in a convenient way without reading tons of manuals. Assuming interdependencies, and using inheritance to get senseful defaults is o.k. But the user should always have the chance to override the defaults, or to change to expert level or even deeper expert levels.
BTW (not a problem of d-i, but a problem of installation) we can learn from the different behaviour of some packages. AFAIK Gnome installs English, if the base-installation is Englisch. KDE asks the user after the first login, which language etc. he wants to have, but some language specific packages need to be installed manually (e.g. spell checkers). Open Office in the other extreme installs with many languages, causing huge downloads of unneeded files.
Helmut Wollmersdorfer