Bug#261929: Can't use tasksel to install multi l10n tasks

[Per Olofsson <pelle@dsv.su.se>]

Lior Kaplan:
> 1. Using tasksel simplifies the installation of many packages through
> tasks... It seems that you don't want to let the users select their
> tasks by them self (except for several task as desktop and a few
> servers). Please let people the option to choose which i18n & l10n
> packages they want.

I do want to let people do what they want, but that's not the
point. The point is that we want to minimise the number of questions
asked during a default installation, to simplify it and make it less
confusing for the majority of users. There could of course be a
medium-priority screen in tasksel which asked about extra language
tasks to install.

> Can't you imagine someone wishes to install both German and Arabic
> fonts or Turkish with northern fonts? And I don't even mention countries
> which have dual official languages (Israel has both Hebrew and Arabic).

I could imagine people wanting to do a lot of things which can't be
done with tasksel.

> 2. "Shouldn't a normal Debian user be able to use at least one package
> installation tool?"
> If the answer is yes, whey do you use tasksel to install a desktop or a
> web server? Can't you do that with apt-get?

Well, yes, but these are just a few tasks, there's a lot of language
tasks.

> 3. Also - I which to have a single language support, but I don't want to
> use that language as the interface. Example: I work with English
> interface (locale: en_US.UTF-8) but had to install the packages for
> Hebrew support (fonts and some common packages).
>
> That is we (=Hebrew speakers) wished for the Hebrew task, so people
> could install all the packages related to Hebrew. But according to your
> way of selecting the tasks, I must work with he_IL.UTF8 for get that
> task installed.

I think what we need to ask ourselves is how many people would benefit
from this. If only a tiny fraction of the userbase would need to
select different language tasks, then it should probably not be a
high-priority question. If it would be useful to a significant
proportion (25% according to tasksel's tasks/README), then it could be
made a high-priority question.

-- 
Pelle