Re: common locale configuration

[Eduard Bloch <blade@debian.org>]

#include <hallo.h>
Tomohiro KUBOTA wrote on Mon Nov 27, 2000 um 02:03:48PM:
> Please check 'language-env' package.  It has configuration database
> for German, Japanese, Russian, Spanish, and Thai.

I did. Some concepts are useable for me too.

> I think the most significant difference between your approach and
> my 'language-env' approach is global setting (yours) or per-user
> (mine).  Though your approach is more straightforward and easy,
> mine is more extensible.  People speaking different languages
> can share a machine.
> 
> However, I can imagine a future configuration system which a user
> can choose global setting (for personal machine) or per-user setting
> (for shared machine).

Of course. My idea should help new users to configure the system after
the installation easier. My system is intended to do some preparation,
especially the configuration of hardware and basic settings,
i.e. choosing the country (or countries), so the setup system can
install needed files automaticaly, i.e. cyrillic font packages, configure
keyboard layout on console, X11 and other environments, i.e. game DKs,
that use own configuration concepts. Your package configures the user
environment, applications etc. per user, which is important too.

> Please check 'language-env'.  I think you will find how complex
> configurations are needed for 'exotic' languages such as Japanese.

I know, I have had many problems on configured an typical European
machine for the Russian language.

> Though I don't know about configuration of _console_ (because
> we cannot configure Linux console for Japanese at all), I think
> the ideal console will be sensible to LC_CTYPE locale.  If there

Well, for other languages it is needed to load different console fonts.

> is a small software which loads proper font for LC_CTYPE, we can
> invoke it from ~/.bashrc or so on.  I can imagine the software
> can automatically invoke UTF-8 mode when needed (of course the
> software checks it from LC_CTYPE locale).  

Yes, a good idea. This tool should check, if the user is local or remote,
on console or in X etc.

> If you are interested
> in multibyte language, check 'kon2', 'jfbterm', and 'hztty' packages.

Sorry, I can only German, English, Russian and a bit French, I am not
familar with multibyte encodings at all.

> Input method is a problem, too.  Some complex languages such as
> Japanese and Chinese need a separate input method.  (Keymap is
> not sufficient.  Can you imagine a keyboard with thousands of
> keys?  Even if there were, it would be difficult to use.)
> Though X Window System has its standard for input method (XIM),
> there are no standard for console.  Thus, I can hardly imagine
> united configuration (choosing) tool for input method.  The
> document included in 'language-env' describes about Japanese
> input methods.

Hm, I can imagine this, but I never thought about the complexity of an
multibyte configuration. English and many european languages use the
default keymap with small (but important) modifications, Slavian
languages uses their own keymaps, but also similar to the default US
keymap. An unified configuration system would at least work with the
mentioned languages, but we could make it extensible and improve it in
the future.

> Though I am not familiar to keymaps, I think it should depends
> on what hardware (i.e., keyboard) the system has.  Then it must
> be global setting.  Fortunately, the current Debian installer
> asks about keyboard.  Can any softwares which need keymap be
> configured to use that information?

I think, it could. It exactly what I am asking for. Keymaps and similar
things should be configured on a central place, it's boring to configure
packages again and again. There should be a central database for this
settings, and the particular configuration scripts would be hacked to
use this. The central configuration tool would do the reconfiguration
later.

So, I think we could work hand in hand and prepare the mentioned support
tools. And at one day, it could be integrated into the official
distribution. Unfortunately, I don't have any spare time before
Christmas, but I will contact you later.

Gr{us,eeting}s,
Eduard.
-- 
=====================================================================
Eduard Bloch <eb@zombie.inka.de>; HP: http://eduard.bloch.com/edecosi
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