Re: RFC: bringing back task packages
On Fri, Feb 18, 2011 at 10:39:16AM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:
> > ### i18n
> >
> > There are many language tasks in tasksel. It might be good to have
> > the task packages be moved out of tasksel; I don't know if it'd make
> > sense to have individual language teams maintain them, or what.
>
> On the other hand, I would warmly welcome an i18n task that reproduces the user
> experience on Macintoshes, where a standard system contains everything to read
> and write a large number of languages. Currently with Debian, on fresh
> installs, I have to iterate over the missing fonts for Japanese and other Asian
> languanges,
A meta-package that installs fonts that provide a glyph for every code point
in Unicode would be great. Preferably something better than ttf-unifont
that supports only Plane 0 and is butt-ugly. If you do anything related to
i18n, having fonts that at least resemble what would be used by users is a
must.
> and look back on my old notes to figure out what packages will
> provide me an input system for chinese characters, because I select French or
> English at install time.
On the contrary, I don't see what an input system would be good for. How
many languages can you write? I can do a few languages with the Latin
script and some basics of Cyrillic -- but even that with a phonetic keymap,
stretching my remnants of Russian lessons from the elementary school.
Such a task would be useful only for installs that are meant to cater to
many users from all around the world -- a very rare occurence, while
cluttering and potentially slowing down the systems of everyone else.
I do believe that every developer who does something even remotely related
to displaying text that might possibly behave different for double-wide,
combining, etc, characters (including for example every single curses
program), has a duty to at least briefly check if these work correctly.
However, for input, unless you do something low level, pasting text works
just as well and is so much simpler if you don't know the script in
question.
Having two such tasks in tasksel would be needless clutter, but at least on
metapackage level, let's have output and input separated.
--
1KB // Microsoft corollary to Hanlon's razor:
// Never attribute to stupidity what can be
// adequately explained by malice.
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