[etch] Update about localechooser
As most d-i related work has slowed down for me the very last couple
of days, I got time again for working on localechooser.
So, this is time for a quick update about the status of this package.
Localechooser is aimed at being the replacement package for
languagechooser and countrychooser packages.
Several user reports has shown that separating the choice of a
language and the choice of a country into two different packages is
not optimal : both choices are highly interdependent, mostly because
the real underlying choice is the *locale* choice.
So, a first conclusion is merging the two packages together.
Another goal is giving potentially higher control to users about the
installed system default locale.
This lead me to work on a new package named "localechooser". The new
features are:
-possibility for changing the language and country choices at any time
during the install without leading to inconsistent locale settings.
This will close #260085 and all bugs merged with it
-possibility of "refining" the chosen locale after choosing the
language and country. For instance, choosing "Dutch", then
"Netherlands" will allow choosing between the 4 nl_NL locales (nl_NL,
nl_NL@euro, nl_NL.UTF-8, nl_NL@euro.UTF-8)
This choice will appear only in expert installs
-allow installing an environment without localization by picking
the "C" language choice. Currently, picking en then US sets up an
environment with en_US locali{z|s}ation (localization, indeed...:-))
This will close #271258
-display a restricted set of languages when the framebuffer is
disabled. Only languages who can really be displayed in such
environment will be proposed
This will close #259104
-allow for a very simple preseeding of language/country/locale choices
by using the preseed/locale value
(there were architecture reasons for not using debian-installer/locale)
Examples:
* preseed/locale=el will autochoose Greek as language but country
will be asked
* preseed/locale=el_GR will automatically skip the language, country
and locale questions (the final choices will be en, GR and el_GR)
* same for preseed/locale=fr_FR@euro or any other combination
* preseed/locale=en_DE will do the same : however, as en_DE locale
is not a supported locale, the final choices will then be: en, DE
and en_US (fallback locale for en). In such case, just like
currently, the country is used for location-related settings such
as the mirror, timezone and possibly stuff handled by
localization-config
This will save one parameter to be passed at the boot prompt for
automating installs.
This also allows localized CDD supporting one
language only, but still allowing to choose a country and locale
-updated documentation: yes I did update the README file..:-)
-abandon the country sorting by continents but alphabetically sort the
countries in the long list (only displayed on expert installs):
This feature is not implemented yet. It may increase the package size
a little so I need to check first if it's worth it.
-code cleaning: the coding style in countrychooser and languagechooser
was not very consistent.
This is not done yet. I made some cleaning but a lot remains to be
done. Some space may be saved, maybe (the package is quite big)
For avoiding confusion, localechooser is still kept in /people/bubulle
in the SVN repository. The checkout command line is:
svn co svn+ssh://svn.debian.org/svn/d-i/people/bubulle/localechooser
It will be moved to trunk/packages as soon as d-i RC2 (or whatever it
may be called) is released. I will then upload a first vesion, wait
for ftpmasters to accept it....and immediately change the
installer/build/pkg-lists/<type>/common files for using it in daily
builds.
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