Re: language.dat: Should we just enable all the patterns?

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

frank@kuesterei.ch (Frank Küster) wrote, long ago:

> What about kicking out all my nice code for handling language.dat, and
> all debconf related language.dat stuff, and simply enabling _all_
> patterns we ship?

Since then, upstream has switched to activate nearly all patterns by
default (only one for norwegian and ukranian, respectively). I would
suggest to follow this decision in principle. On the other hand, the
stuff we coded is such a user-friendly interface that I think we should
not drop it completely.

I therefore suggest, in approximate time order, that we

1. Change language.dflt to enable nearly all patterns and switch the
   default for the debconf question ("Manage patterns with debconf") to
   NO. 

2. Extract the code from postinst and put it into a separate binary,
   /usr/bin/tetex-hyphen (or the like). Call that binary from postinst
   with the command line "tetex-hyphen --debian-postinst"

3. Enhance the code in tetex-hyphen so that it will check for all
   available hyphenation patterns and offer to manage them all - this is
   a suggestion by Hilmar, thanks. We still have to decide whether we
   require the user to manually specify a language for each file, or
   even to specify which of the patterns found she wants to use at all. 

for texmfdir in `kpsewhich --expand-path='$TEXMF'| sed -e 's/:/ /g'`; do \
ls $texmfdir/tex/generic/{,ru}hyphen/* 2>/dev/null; done

   gives more than all patterns (lots of russian stuff I don't know the
   purpose of).

4. Patch texconfig so that, in addition to opening language.dat in an
   editor, it also offers to use tetex-hyphen. We shouldn't use debconf,
   but simple dialog in this case - then we can offer this to TE for
   upstream inclusion.

Once 4 is done, we can completely drop the debconf question.

Regards, Frank
-- 
Frank Küster, Biozentrum der Univ. Basel
Abt. Biophysikalische Chemie