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.