Re: Should we really use countries in languagechooser
Quoting Alastair McKinstry (mckinstry@computer.org):
> The country information is used in two places:
> (1) In selecting dialect; eg. US American vs British; Swiss German
> vs German (in principle; not done yet, I believe)
This is only needed in one case : portuguese.
But, we have to deal with this as we currently have both pt and pt_BR
translations.
This is the only case where "dialects" ( I would rather say
"variantse) are really used.
> (2) To select _default_ values for other things:
> - keyboard
> - ftp mirror
> - timezone
> others?
AFAIK, I'm not aware of other locations where country is used.
So, this concerns the following d-i packages:
choose-mirror
kbd-chooser
base-config
choose-mirror's list is a list of country codes.
It comes from the mirror list : grep -e "^Country" Mirrors.masterlist
| uniq|awk '{print $2};' (or something similar)
kbd-chooser list is derived from languagechooser list
base-config list...well I'm not sure..:-)
> Perhaps one possibility is to ask the country question at a lower
> priority _after_ the language question, if necessary; e.g. we might not
> need to ask the 'which country' bit for many languages, and it would
> simplify the language question. This approach was taken in woody, I
> believe.
Agreed, but unfortunately lower priority is a problem because of
portuguese.
Portuguese speaking people *have* to choose between pt_BR and pt. Both
are different enough and I guess that neither brazilian folks nor
portuguese folks would really appreciate that the "other" language is
the default..:-)
Anyway, choosing the country is an important enough setting for having
it at the same priority than language.
I vote for a "countrychooser" udeb in parallel with a simplified
languagechooser udeb.
The country list should then be the official ISO-3166 list. Your
iso-codes package has all the needed stuff for this (including country
names translations).
The point is : is this feasible for sarge or not?
If this is not feasible, then we should focus on fixing
languagechooser so that languages with no clear default country (such
as Arabic) are OK. We chould also fix it so that only languages for
which a full or nearly full translation of
debian-installer+base-config exists are displayed.
I think that languagechooser should indeed at least forget about the
country stuff (it clutters up the language selection screen). Each
language should either have a "default" country, when this default is
obvious, or none when there is no obvious default.
That would mean that we only display ONE choice for french. This
choice would then use "France" as the default country (thus, as long
as "fr" is chosen in the first screen,
kbd-config/choose-mirror/base-config will use France as default).
I *know* this is not perfect : my belgian/swiss/canadian/african
friends will probably hate me for suggesting this, but what else can
we really do?
Same for english : default is "C" with country=United States (will
probably generate a lot of rant also....:-)))
I will try to create a modified languagechooser with these concepts.
I'm a pretty bad coder, so this will be maybe quite crude, but I hope
you'll get the point.
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