Proposal for languagechooser and language list

[Christian Perrier <bubulle@debian.org>]

First of all, sorry for just putting ideas in this mail and not
propose any implementation. I'm afraid my skills are too low for
proposing anything but really bad code. Not speaking of time
lacking..:-)


The current language list (which is the very first prompt a user
"sees" when installing Debian) is not really satisfactory (imho, of
course).

The list is alphabetically sorted with all choices being translation
of the english sentence "Choose this to proceed in xxxxxx"


Thus, hungarian comes first (because of its leading "A"), then french
variants (because I translated as "Choisissez" which comes before
"Choose") and so on...

There were a few proposals recently for changing this to simpler
choices, for instance only language names.

The variants also induce some confusion by macking the list a bit too
long.

Here are my proposal :

-change this to a 2 stage process : first choose the language
(e.g. "Français"). Then choose the country variant (is "Français" is
chosen, the user chooses between Belgique, Canada, France, Luxembourg,
Suisse)

-simplfy the sentence : just keep the language names (translated, just
like they currently are)

-find a rule for sorting languages :
 -English (which is the default) should come first
 -Sort other languages. Below are some proposals:
    -alphabetically (not easy : where should double-byte languages go?)
    -by translation status in Debian:
         -first sorting key-->translation status for d-i
	 -second sorting key-->combination of translation status for
	  debconf templates and programs translations (by using 
          http://www.debian.org/intl/l10n/ pages when they will be
	  updated again
    -by numbers of people speaking these languages in the world. Many
     references may be found on this topic. For instance, by googling
     a bit, I found http://www.photius.com/rankings/languages2.html:
         -Chinese, Mandarin
	 -Spanish
	 -English
	 -Arabic
	 -Bengali
	 -Hindi
	 -Portuguese
	 -Russian
	 -Japanese
	 -German
	 -Chinese, Wu
	 -Javanese
	 -Korean
	 -French
	 -Turkish
	 -Vietnamese
	 .../... we have 50 languages listed
	 This reference is an ethnological reference which lists the
         number of people *really* speaking the given language. This
	 is not a sum of the populations of countries for which
	 the given language is among the official languages of the
	 country (I found that statistic also, but only for the Top10
          languages : http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0775272.html#A0774735)


Does somebody have comments on this?

If the 2 stage process is agreed, we will need someone for
implementing it in languagechooser. Joey, Petter, Tollef, you have for
sure a valuable opinion on this as you are listed as the major
contributors for languagechooser...



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