Countrychooser commited in CVS
The newly proposed countrychooser package has been commited to HEAD.
General design ideas:
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* All countries are proposed
The country list, names and ISO codes are taken from the iso-codes
package
* The package sets up debian-installer/country debconf value
Thus, it is able to work with the current languagechooser while
we wait for the new proposed one (see Joey progress update for
post-beta2)
The default country comes from debian-installer/country
previously set up by languagechooser (the new one will have one
default country per language)
* This country choice should be used after for all questions
regarding countries
Some issues remains-->should this draw locale rather than location?
In-depth look:
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Here come the gory details..
I've taken as much stuff from languagechooser.
countrychooser alon is a very simple script, similar to
languagechooser.
The most complicated thing is the handling of the country list and
country names translations. I didn't want to end up with a huge list
of country names to be translated, thus putting a stupid pressure on
translators.
Alastair McKinstry's iso-codes package has indeed all the needed stuff
: the iso-3166.tab file which is a tab-separated file of all country
names (according to ISO-3166). This package also includes translations
for most languages (the vast majority of those we already support in
d-i).
So, I used a mechanism for building the package templates from this
iso-3166 file AND for getting the country names translations from the
iso-codes translations.
This mechanism is currently a crude shell-script which merges the
"normal" translations (the template Description) and translations
coming from iso-codes.
The drawback is that ALL country names in iso-3166.tab have to be
translated for the language list to be translated. po2debconf doesn't
use "partial" translations (I've asked Denis if something is possible
for this).
As the iso-codes package currently has very partial translations for
most languages (german has 50 fuzzy entries), I left an opportunity
for dropping more complete translations in the package. See the
"iso-codes.updated" directory and the french file there.
All this explains that the package Build-Depends on iso-codes because
I use the translations in the "mktemplates" script and build the
country list in the "get-iso-codes" script
The iso-3166.tab is needed when postinst the package. This is because
the debian-installer/country needs to keep the country ISO code, while
we select a country name. Hence the countrymap script for getting the
code from the name (script stolen from languagechooser).
I currently put this file in /etc which is BAD. Indeed, I'm
considering asking the iso-codes maintainer to build an udeb with this
file alone, in its natural location -->
/usr/share/iso-codes. Suggestions welcome.
TODO list:
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-clean up the english templates. I'll ask -l10n-english
-translations may start. Anyway, translators will notice they're no
more at 100% and will start translating. But this is against a
possibly moving target
-define the package priority. I'm not really familiar with all this,
so suggestions are welcome. Petter worried about the additional
question, so maybe the priority should be a bit lower than
languagechooser (after all, that one will define a "default" country :
France for french, Germany for german.....)
-clean up the scripts : I'm a bad programmer..:-)
-look at other places which ask for a country (mirror location,
timezone configuration) and adapt these for using
debian-installer/country. However, the country list there is probably
shorter than the world country list..:-)
-add the package to initrd
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