Bug#253404: Bug #253404: Should we set the general LANG variable for languages not supported at the console?
In the old bug #253404, we discuss the case of CJK languages for which setting
LANG to debian-installer/locale is considered partly harmful.
The main problem is that this makes the console unreadable for users.
The same happens for Hebrew and Arabic (because of the lack of RTL
console) and will happen for Indic script languages, Thai, Khmer, and
so on....
Kenshi Muto then suggested that we keep this as setting the variable
properly is a task that is considered painful for users....however he
also suggested that we should then maybe override this with "LANG=C"
for the root user.
After thinking about the pros and cons, I'm tempted to support this
change as well as avoiding to set the console to UTF-8 mode (a UTF-8
console and a C locale gives *very ugly* results on debconf
screens...)
That would mean adding something like this to /root/.profile:
export LANG=C
export LANGUAGE=C
This could be done in localechooser's prebaseconfig script.
plus some magic elsewhere for the non-Unicode console.
This would probably need to define one more category for languages:
those who can be displayed at the console when we use jfbterm or the
first stage framebuffer environment....and those who are currently in
"category 2" but can be displayed at the Linux console, with the right
font (such as Latin-2 languages).
Comments?
--
Reply to: