How may we let the user to select which languages he wants
Hi!
Thank you to all that have answered my message.
> Pablo De Napoli wrote:
>
> > * When installing the mo files for language translations (in
> > /usr/share/locale) let the user choose which languages he wants
> > (thought some environment variable ?)
Joy Hess wrote:
>
> We would love to support this, but it is not clear how to do it; see the
> archives of this mailing list.
>
Let me explain my idea about how to support this.
My idea is to have an environment variable (say DPKG_LINGUAS) with the
list of the languages that the user wants to install
For example for choosing english , spanish and italian you would use
export DPKG_LINGUAS="en es it"
Then when you ask dpkg to install one package , and it finds a .mo file to
to be installed in /usr/share/locale/X/LC_MESSAGES , it would check if the
language X is in the DPKG_LINGUAS variable. If found, the file is
installed and otherwise ignored (if DPKG_LINGUAS is not set, all the
languages would be installed)
This aproach has many advantages:
1) the packages don't need to be modified. Only we would need to make a
little change to dpkg (I've taken a look at the sources, but I didn't
understand much yet. I'm not sure if I could write a patch for doing this.
If you like my idea and know about the dpkg internals, please help me!)
(and of course we need also to modify apt/deselect in order to provide a
friendly interface to the user, but this surely will be easier)
2) we don't need a lot of new packages! (this is better I think that
the solution proposed by David Starner) Otherwise the debian archive
would growth a lot.
3) This will allow to support several languages at the same time (In many
servers there are user that speaks different languages as Christian Kurz
points out).
Thank you
Pablo De Napoli
<pdenapo@dm.uba.ar>
(please note that I'm not currently in the debian-devel list, so please
if you answer my message , send my a copy to the adress above).
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