Re: Countrychooser changes
Quoting Joey Hess (joeyh@debian.org):
> I'm having a hard time seeing how a user is supposed to unststand this.
For sure, that's hard to explain and the current verbosity probably
doesn't help. My idea while writing these templates was to give a
canvas of what needs to be said, imho....
> Put yourself in the mindset of a user who does not know about locales,
> and certianly does not know about supported locales. All of the existing
> (IMHO over-verbose and confusing) text in the two questions will be
> ignored. The user will be annoyed if their actual contry is not in the
> first list, and will go pick it from the second list. The installer will
> do something reasonable with the locale, or not. The user will be
> annoyed he saw two more questions than seem to be necessary.
When the user picks up the second list, the installer *does* something
reasonable for locales-->it keeps the default locale, inherited from
languagechooser.
If one chooses French then United States, the locale will be
fr_FR. This is reasonable, though not perfect (probably some will they
they would prefer en_US or whatever...)
> I can't imagine that many users will read and understand the warnings, and
> opt to pick a country from the first list that is not really their
> country, just to get a locale setting that is closer to what they
> desire.
I don't expect them to pick up a country that's not exactly
theirs. The French user from USA will for sure go to Other, then pick
up USA.
The benefit is not for these users, but rather for users from listed
and supported countries (in case of French, that means France,
Switzerland, Luxembourg, Belgium, Canada).
With "my" scheme, we are sure to offer ALL possible and valid choices,
which is rather impossible with single languagechooser (just try to
pick up Spanish at languagechooser and you'll understand-->Debian
currently supports TWENTY calid locales for Spanish)
>
> Wouldn't it be less confusing to do it like this:
>
> * languagechooser lists the top few countries for each language, plus
> "other". If "other" is chosen, do not set country.
Again, yes, but *what* are the "top countries" ? See my Spanish
example. es_VE is a perfectly valid locale in Debian...but we, for
sure, won't list Venezuela in languagechooser.
I'm not very fond of making such choices which sometimes have strong
political implications.
Also, this means that for every language for which we want to offer a
single keystroke choice byt combining it with a country, we will have
to have at least to choices. This will clutter up the languagechooser
screen...
There are currently 29 possible languages in d-i (by possible, I mean
"language which have some chances to be complete in the next weeks).
We risk to have this doubled or tripled......
> * countrychooser displays the full list of countries. If "other" was
> chosen, display it at high priority, otherwise, use low priority.
> * countrychooser generates a list of all supported locales for the
> language. If the above two steps resulted in a valid locale, make it
> be the default. Otherwise, pick a reasonable default locale for the
> selected language, ignoring the country. Always ask this question at
> low priority.
>
> So, we would have four scenarios:
I can't say I don't like these scenarios. They, for sure, reduce the
number of *screens* seen. However, these screens will be very long screens.
In the es_VE example I used, the user will choose Spanish (Other) in
first screen......then be dropped in the huge country list, with
default being either no country, or Spain.....in both cases, (s)he
will need to browse a huge list up or down to Venezuela.
I'll will try to summarize how languagechooser would be like with
>
> 1. Most users would choose their language and country together in language
> chooser, and proceed with the install immediatly.
> 2. Some users would choose their language with no country ("other") in
> language chooser, and get a big list of countries to choose from. They
> would select a country, and the locale would be set to something that
> is, at worst, not too far off, and supported.
> 3. Users in expert mode would get to choose a language, then a country,
> and finally, would have the option to fine-tune their locale in yet
> another screen.
> 4. Customised or automated installs would be able to pre-seed the
> language, country, and locale as is appropriate for their target
> audience.
In 2. we could have the short screen I propose. It would cover the
vast majority of cases remaining after 1 and would be easier to use,
imho.
This schemes was my first idea, indeed. But when I counted how many
entries languagechooser would have, I thought to the "single entry"
languagechooser idea.
For sure, that means always two screens at the minimum. Except for
some "one country" languages where the second screen could have a
lower priority. For instance, Japanese currently only support Japan
which makes my current second screen look a bit silly with "Japan,
Other" choice....
I wish we can find some time for discussing this on
#debian-boot. Could we arrange a short meeting with people who showed
up some interest in these topics ? I *know* I'm not often present on
IRC, but I can try..:-)
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