Re: bogl

[Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS <edmundo@rano.org>]

Adam Di Carlo <adam@onshore.com>:

> > I didn't see any objections, so I've gone and committed some changes
> > in utilities/bogl/.
> 
> Excellent.
> 
> How far are we from an i18n'ed version of bf ?

Soon I would like to try building boot-floppies with the language
chooser and all the messages in UTF-8 running on the UTF-8 virtual
terminal, just to see if it works. This way of doing things might
never be used in a Debian release because bowl might be ready in time
for the woody release instead, but a vitual terminal that shares code
with bowl could still be useful for running on vt2 or for when the
user wants a shell, and running dbootstrap on it is a good way of
testing the terminal.

If UTF-8 is to be used other than internally in dbootstrap, then at
some point we'll need ae (or some other tiny editor) to work in UTF-8.

Another fun thing I want to try is to see if fonts can be effectively
compressed using libpng instead of gzip ...

A general design problem I worry about is whether localisations can be
added to boot floppies without recompiling the code. Should there be
separate language packs and a script that adds them into root.bin,
base.tgz, etc so that people can continue adding and improving
localisations after a Debian release and without having to learn how
to build boot-floppies?

Edmund