Re: How many people need locales?
David Starner wrote:
> Santiago Vila wrote:
> > 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.
>
> And making it a conffile but not is a huge improvement?
Sorry, but I can't parse the previous sentence.
If you mean following policy is not a huge improvement over the
current conffile status, well, it might well not be a huge improvement.
But nowhere is written that improvements have to be huge before we
decide to implement them. We do not reject improvements just because
they are not "huge".
Using a conffile and saying "I will not change this file anymore" is a
poor "emulation" of the postinst-generated configuration file mechanism
(whose main feature is that user is never asked a stupid question).
The current default file is not empty. It has a reference to
/usr/share/doc/locales/SUPPORTED.gz for example. If this were written
in the FSSTND era, it would read /usr/doc/locales/SUPPORTED.gz instead.
I think this shows that even the most minimal default configuration
file might need a change from time to time, to be in sync with the
latest policy, which invalidates the "I will not change the default
file anymore" argument. It would be better if the default file which
is installed by default were the best possible default file which may
be written at release time, every release, without having to worry
about whether or not we changed it from woody to woody+1.
The conffile mechanism should only be used when it's useful to do so.
If there is the smallest chance that dpkg asks a question for which
the only logical answer is "no, I want to keep the current version",
then it does not make sense to use a procedure which makes dpkg to
ask a question. It's better to assume that the answer is no.
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