Re: common locale configuration
Hi,
At Sat, 2 Dec 2000 15:06:08 +0100,
Eduard Bloch <blade@debian.org> wrote:
> Of course. My idea should help new users to configure the system after
> the installation easier. My system is intended to do some preparation,
Sure. For example, Japanese users have to buy several books, search
mailing list archive many times, study hard for months, and so on so
on, to configure Japanese environment. I think this is crasy. I want
to stop this situation.
> 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.
My idea is:
- Let's develop a small software to select language and country, like
'set-language-env' and 'tklanguage' scripts in 'language-env' package.
User can choose 'global' selection or 'per-user' selection. Of
course only root user can choose 'global' selection.
- Don't use debconf because it cannot be used for per-user settings.
- Some works such as installation of needed packages need root priviledge.
We have to develop some way when a non-root user needs such works.
- Your idea is to prepare a common setting (like debconf database) for
language or country so that other packages can use it for configure
themselves on installation (using postinst script or so on). This
idea of common setting seems to conflict with my idea of per-user
configuration. It is impractical that the postinst scripts read
settings for all users and configure for all users.
I think the last problem is serious. I don't want to abandon 'per-user'
idea because 'global' configuration affects the root user. I think
it is not a good idea for root user to have large amount of tricky
configurations which are needed for 'exotic' languages.
I can imagine a few solutions:
- Our new package will have configuration for these packages.
- Improve these packages so that they obey common configuration
methods like 'LANG' variables. Generally, this is the ideal method.
- and so on.
We will have to determine which solution to be used for each package.
Can you show examples of packages which need language configuration?
(Emacsen need their own configurations for keyboard encoding system,
terminal encoding system, file encoding system, process encoding system,
font, input method, and so on. Xterm needs font setting.)
Note this idea will make our new package very similar to 'language-env',
since this idea abandon your 'common setting' idea.
> 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.
It is exciting! However, what do you think of the future evolution
of our package? Of course it must be integrated into the official
distribution, i.e., the package must be in 'main' distribution.
However, how about being integrated into the core of Debian system,
such as Debian Installer, 'base-files' package, or so on?
---
Tomohiro KUBOTA <kubota@debian.org>
http://surfchem0.riken.go.jp/~kubota/
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