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Bug#260025: marked as done ([Proposal] The locale generation at the prebaseconfig)

Your message dated Thu, 8 Jun 2006 12:32:03 -0400
with message-id <20060608163203.GA27265@kitenet.net>
and subject line closing old bug
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--- Begin Message --- 
Package: prebaseconfig
Severity: wishlist
Tags: l10n patch d-i

* Recai Oktas [2004-07-11 21:08:04+0300]
> Hi,
> 
> I'm planning to work on a patch which generates the locale for the 
> selected language at the prebaseconfig stage.  There are some pretty 
> good reasons to do so:
> 
> * As a critical step for i18n, the locale generation should not be part 
>   of a kludgy script like termwrap.  It deserves a well-defined conf 
>   script on its own right.
> 
> * Some initialization scripts of the installed system may need to reach 
>   the locale info found in the /etc/environment file.  Indeed, this is 
>   the case for console-screen.sh of console-tools and another bug report 
>   (#258681) has been filed for keymap.sh of console-common, which refers 
>   to this file.  In the current implementation, /etc/environment is 
>   created at the end of the base-config, which introduces a problem for 
>   unicode consoles as explained below.
>   
> * We modified the keymap handling to resolve a (IMO) serious d-i bug 
>   (#251550) somewhat related with the unicode consoles.  It seems that a 
>   similar solution will be needed for languages using a UTF-8 locale 
>   (confirmed for tr_TR.UTF-8).  The console must be in the unicode mode 
>   under the unicode locales, but _unless_ we consider to rehack [1] the 
>   keymap loading mechanism, /etc/environment is the only source to 
>   extract the locale info which mandates to install it in the first 
>   stage d-i and later use it to switch the unicode mode.  In fact, IMHO, 
>   such an approach would present the most simple and natural solution 
>   for the problem at hand.
> 
> * By moving the locale generation code to prebaseconfig, one of the 
>   central duties of termwrap will be transfered to this package, so we 
>   will be able to simplify the termwrap.  According to my tests, I can 
>   safely state that, termwrap would not be needed at all for languages 
>   having a charset of ISO-8859-[1-15].  But it would have to be used 
>   mainly for Asian and Cyrillic consoles (not sure for the latter).
> 
> As a side note, please notice that we wouldn't need to touch the 
> termwrap in an effort to simplify it, till the proposed patch matures 
> enough.
> 
> So, have you any comments or objections?
> 
> Regards,
> 
> [1] The current code base of 'loadkeys' is rather messy, which makes 
>     such modifications difficult.

Hi,

In accordance with my proposal, I prepared a patch set.  Please consult  
to my previous post quoted above to see the rationale behind these 
changes.

Here goes the descriptions of patches attached.  Feel free to review 
them.

* 75generate-locales.gz: Prebaseconfig script to install the locale for 
  the selected language.  It gets the localecode from the debconf 
  registery and does the following things:

  (1) Parse (and validate) the localecode
  (2) Generate the locale
  (3) Save the generated locale entry in /target/etc/locale.gen
  (4) Setup the locale environment in /target/environment
  
  Considering some possibilites for the future, the script is somewhat 
  over-designed.  It is driven by the 'debian-installer/locale' for the 
  moment, but it is quite easy to make it work with multiple locales 
  (changing a few line should be sufficient), though the current i18n 
  design of d-i doesn't supply a "multiple language selection" feature 
  (providing that one of them is the default).  As I confirm from my 
  real life experiences, this feature comes handy when people from 
  different nations share the same computing environment.  Perhaps we 
  may add a new debconf menu in languagechooser which could be shown at 
  the low priority.  Another possibility which comes to mind regarding 
  the multiple locales feature is that, almost all languages have a 
  Unicode (UTF-8) and a non-Unicode variant locale (e.g.  fr_FR@euro and 
  fr_FR.UTF-8), so we could install both of them for the user's 
  convenience.

  I choosed the prebaseconfig package for the script and set the order
  to '75' (somewhere after the similar scripts, 65languagechooser and
  70kbd-chooser).  It is perfectly possible to put it another package
  like languagechooser or even in a separate package of its own.
  
* prebaseconfig-generate-locales.patch: Required patch to add the script
  to the prebaseconfig package.

The script has been heavily tested with a number of languages (to name a
few; French, Turkish, Russian, Japanese and Ukrainian), so I think it
should be safe to add it to d-i.  Please note that, in order to resolve
the bug #258681 completely, inclusion of this script is _mandatory_
since it creates the /etc/environment before the 2nd stage installation, 
and hence, feeds the /etc/init.d/keymap.sh with the locale environment.

Regards,

-- 
roktas

Attachment: 75generate-locales.gz
Description: Binary data

diff -ruN prebaseconfig.orig/debian/templates prebaseconfig/debian/templates
--- prebaseconfig.orig/debian/templates	Fri Jul 16 14:18:09 2004
+++ prebaseconfig/debian/templates	Fri Jul 16 14:23:11 2004
@@ -19,6 +19,10 @@
 Type: text
 _Description: Setting up frame buffer...
 
+Template: prebaseconfig/progress/generate-locales
+Type: text
+_Description: Generating locale...
+
 Template: prebaseconfig/progress/prepare-base-config
 Type: text
 _Description: Preparing for base-config...

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--- Begin Message --- 
This bug is outdated, since the locale generation stuff is not done by
termwrap anymore, and is indeed handled much like was suggested here.

-- 
see shy jo

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