Prospective work on choose-mirror
Choose-mirror handling of the mirror country list currently has a few
drawbacks which may be enhanced:
-the Choices list in templates is built from the mirror countries
mentioned in Mirrors.masterlist. This file is fetched at build time
and the debconf template is then modified on the fly to have the
country codes list
-as a consequence, an English "translation" of these country codes is
needed to be maintained
-as another consequence, as soon as a new country has a Debian mirror
it is added to the code list....and the translations get outdated
-thus, for all languages, choose-mirror suddenylm displays a list
of country codes instead of country names
This situation is likely to happen as soon as the package is rebuilt
after Mirrors.masterlist includes a new country for at least one
mirror. It happened a few months ago when the first mirror in
Argentina was added.
Another effect of this is the need for translating a big bunch of
country codes.....a work which is already done for iso-codes (used by
countrychooser).
In order to make all this more simple, I have worked on a new
solution:
-the template is built on the fly from Mirrors.masterlist
-the country names (in English) are grabbed from iso-codes
-the translations are also grabbed from iso-codes
This will save a lot of work to translators and avoid the situation
where a new build outdates all translations.
This work consists of
-addition of a get-iso-codes script (similar to the one in
countrychooser) for getting country names translations
-addition of a mktemplates script which builds the new templates file
-addition of a intltool-merge (same as countrychooser) which allows
for partial translations in Choices lists
-a few changes to the sort-countries script
-the call for these utilities in debian/rules
Up to now, this was done locally on my system.
I just commited the two new files to SVN as well as the new
sort-countries file as "sort-countries.new".
The changes have been added to debian/rules, but currently commented.
These changes need a very solid review as you all now are aware of
the poor quality of scripts I write..:-)
So, DO NOT uncomment lines in debian/rules currently. I have put
warnings there...
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