[SUMMARY] Bits about countrychooser and languagechooser
Here is a summary of the ideas which were exchanged during this
thread.
1) Selecting language before country/location/whatever is to be
preferred (sorry, Anton...looks like there's a consensus about
this)
2) Minimize the questions as much as possible for "simple" cases
This is why the language question may offer a country choice at the
same time (like current languagechooser). However, we should limit
the number of choices for a given language (max 3?)
3) Avoid too long choices list as much as possible (not really
easy to use with text frontends)
4) Try to cover all possible cases: see Nikolai's "russian speaking user
living in Germany" example
5) Some ambitious schemes are possible (Denis, Joey, Steinar ideas for
a "menu")
These lead me to two proposals : one quite simple, based on existing
*chooser packages, and one more ambitious, with an intermediate menu
Simple scheme
-------------
-keep the current languagechooser with Petter changes solving the
sorting issue. For languages used widely enough in more than one
country, offer to choose either a language_country choice, or a
language_other choice
This gives us three kinds of languages:
-languages without any "clear" default country (ex: Arabic)
only one entry like this
ar Arabic (All countries)
-languages with only one clear default country (ex: Czech)
two entries:
cs_CZ Czech (Czech Republic)
cs Czech (Other countries)
-languages with at least two countries where they're *widely*
used (ex: Spanish)
es_ES Spanish (Spain)
es_MX Spanish (Mexico)
es Spanish (Other countries)
No more than 3 choices in addition to the "Other" choice
-If a "complete" entry is chosen there, skip countrychooser
-Otherwise, go to countrychooser:
-First show a short choice of all countries with the given
language. This list is built by 'grep "^${LANGUAGE}"
/usr/share/i18n/SUPPORTED. For Spanish, that would give:
es_AR Argentina
es_BO Bolivia
es_CL Chile
.../...
es Other
This screen warns about the consequences of choosing "Other" and
using an unsupported locale
-If a "complete" entry is chosen there, go ahead
-If Other is chosen, present the user with the world country list and
warn again about unsupported locales
This scheme requires:
-case by case choices on languagelist for respecting the "no more than
4 choices including Other" rule
-some rewrite in countrychooser for handling the supported locales
stuff
-having the SUPPORTED file from the locales package already installed
for building the choices list on the fly (5.5kb lost on root disk)
Advantages: simple to implement, may be done quickly
Drawbacks : the language selection list will be quite long as we will
end up with about 20 supported languages and 2 entries for
most of them
Ambitious Scheme
----------------
-Switch to languagechooser_ng : 1 language, 1 choice
-For each language, propose a default country and show deducted values
for timezone, mirror and keyboard:
Language selected: English
Based on your chosen language, the following
default settings can be used for the install.
If they are fine, select "Accept". Otherwise
you can change them by selecting the appropriate
menu entry.
Country: United States [ change ]
Keyboard: us [ change ]
Time Zone: US/Eastern [ change ]
Debian mirror: http.us.debian.org [ change ]
[ Accept ]
This requires a full rewrite of kbd-config and choose-mirror (or
dropping them for this new system) as well as some parts of
base-config.
Advantages: far more logicial : all similar stuff is done at the same time
more easy to extend, for instance for handling the charset
choice (currently put under the rug.....)
Drawbacks : needs lot of work, so probably not easy to implement
before next beta
always two screens....but several others are saved
need some "one language/one country" choices which is
not easy for some languages (English at first...:-)))
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