Re: How many people need locales?
David Starner wrote:
> Santiago Vila wrote:
> > The bug basically says "/etc/locale.gen should not be a conffile
> > because most people will need to modify it" but Ben does not agree
> > that people using locales is "most people".
>
> Recent copies (unless it was changed back to big file edition) are
> blank, and add the list of locales to /usr/share/doc/locales/SUPPORTED.gz.
> So people will very rarely get prompted for changes. Then, what's the problem?
Very rarely != never. If you put an /etc/locale.gen file which is
different than the default one before installing locales_2.2, dpkg
will still prompt about it.
We are supposed to minimize the number of questions. If we can go from
"very rarely" to "never", that's already a gain. If we can make every
Debian user to save five seconds of time and we have one million users,
that's five million of saved seconds.
> I don't want to have to go through a debconf interface to try and configure
> my locale.gen file; heck, SUPPORTED doesn't even include half my locales
> (mainly UTF-8). How does making it a conffile hurt things again?
>
> (locale.gen attached as an extreme example that needs to be supported.)
I never asked for a debconf interface (I explained in the bug report
(#110980) a possible way to do it and it would take just a few lines
of shell scripting). I just asked following policy.
What's wrong with following policy when it says configuration files
for which there is not a default which satifies almost everybody
should not be managed by the conffile mechanism?
If the maintainer thinks policy does not need to be followed here, why
does he not propose a policy change? If policy and interpretation
differ aren't we supposed to change one of them?
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