Bug#702050: tasksel: a meta task to install all language tasks ?

[Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org>]

Package: tasksel
Severity: wishlist
X-Debbugs-CC: debian-devel@lists.debian.org

Le Tue, Feb 26, 2013 at 04:57:48PM -0800, Russ Allbery a écrit :
> Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org> writes:
> 
> > on these systems, getting all the default fonts and input methods would
> > also be a big plus.  For the moment we are years behind other systems
> > such as Mac OS, where at any time it is possible to switch language or
> > browse a website in a language that is not the default one of the
> > session.
> 
> Amen to this.  I care a lot about having fairly complete Unicode coverage
> in my display fonts, and I've often had to trawl through aptitude to try
> to guess at which font packages I need to install just to, for example,
> see the front page of Wikipedia without annoying empty squares.

I just installed all the task-<language>-desktop packages on my computer
using equivs and a Depends field populated by the output of the following
command, run from the tasks directory of the tasksel package.

    find . -maxdepth 1 -type f | xargs grep -l '^Task:'|
      xargs grep-dctrl --exact-match -FSection l10n --and -FEnhances desktop -sTask -n |
      grep -v -e gnome -e kde | sed -e 's/^/ task-/' -e 's/$/,/'

The good news is that they are all co-installable.  The bad news is that not
all software are able to pick correctly the appropriate font.  In particular,
epiphany and chromium now display Chinese characters with Chinese glyphs even
for texts where the indicated language is Japanese.  Fortunately, iceweasel
picks the right fonts.

If it were posssible to tackle such issues after the Wheezy release, then I
think that it would be worth to give our users the choice to install all
localisation tasks.  I think that I can write a patch where debian/control
would be refreshed from a template, so that at each upload the meta-task would
be always comprehensive.

Have a nice week-end,

-- 
Charles Plessy
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan