Bug#502244: cdebconf: fall-back languages not working; mechanism to drop translations broken?

[Frans Pop <elendil@planet.nl>]

On Saturday 29 November 2008, Ben Hutchings wrote:
> Please try the following patch.

Thanks a lot for the patch Ben. This is actually a patch for #502240, 
which already had a patch by Jérémy Bobbio.

I have tested both patches, and it turns out that this BR is also solved 
when #502240 is solved, which does follow somewhat from my original 
analysis, but is not 100% obvious.

Apparently translations _do_ get dropped *in memory* even though that does 
not get saved to /var/lib/cdebconf/templates.dat on the ramdisk until 
anna gets run. So if you look at that file during the early stages of the 
installation, it will appear that all translations are still available, 
even when for practical purposes they are not.
If the user switches to a different language during those early stages, 
translations will get "re-dropped" in memory starting from the _full set_ 
of available translations in templates.dat.

So there is no problem with cdebconfs handling of debconf/language versus 
setting LANGUAGE.

There is one problem with Ben's patch which is not present in Jérémy's 
patch: Ben's patch will also drop se.UTF8 translations, which is 
obviously not what we want as se_NO (and thus also se) is the preferred 
language for Northern Sami.

I have got a commit ready based on Jérémy's patch with fixes for the minor 
issues identified by Colin and will commit that and upload tomorrow if 
there are no further comments.

Note that for Northern Sami this does still leave choose-mirror mostly in 
English and its country list as country codes, but as mentioned in the 
original report that is a problem in the way choose-mirror is built 
rather than in cdebconf (and can also affect other components that do 
merging of PO files during package build).

Cheers,
FJP