Which languages shall be supported with the lang packs, and how?

[Chris Halls]

Hi Martin

On Fri, 2004-11-12 at 14:49 +0100, Martin Pitt wrote:
> It changes the dependencies for all openoffice.org-l10n-* packages
> from
> 
>   Depends: openoffice.org
> 
> (with some version, but that does not matter here) to
> 
>   Depends: openoffice.org | language-support-XX

Thanks for your work.  Actually, your patch should have just been a one
liner in control.lang.in - that control file is actually generated from
control.in and control.lang.in.

--- control.lang.in     17 Sep 2004 07:40:21 -0000      1.24
+++ control.lang.in     15 Nov 2004 22:32:17 -0000
@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
 Package: openoffice.org-l10n- at LCODE@
 Architecture: all
-Depends: openoffice.org (>> 1.1.1+1.1.2)
+Depends: openoffice.org (>> 1.1.1+1.1.2) | language-support- at LCODE@
 Conflicts: openoffice.org1.1-l10n- at LCODE@
 Replaces: openoffice.org1.1-l10n- at LCODE@
 Provides: openoffice.org-l10n-1.1.2, openoffice.org1.1-l10n- at LCODE@

> However, while doing this some questions arose:
> 
> - IIRC we only want to support 10 to 15 languages. Nevertheless I
>   think it does not hurt to provide alternative dependencies for all
>   l10n packages anyway; if a particular language-support-XX package is
>   not actually available, then the l10n package will behave exactly
>   like the old version (without an alternative at all). Is this okay
>   for everybody?

That should be fine - we have the same situation for anyone reusing our
OOo packaging but not making their own language-support-XX packages.

> - There are some sublanguages which have a more irregular name, like
>   "pt" and "pt-br" (Brazilian Portugese), or "zh-cn" and "zh-tw".
>   Ideally, d-i would just try to install "language-support-XX" if
>   language "XX" was selected.  But these special cases prevent this.

Are you viewing the sublanguages as second class languages?  The
languages really are different, so you should view them as first class
languages, needing their own language-support-XX, where XX can also be
pt-br or whatever.  A user will either be from Portugal, in which case
they want pt, or from Brazil, in which case they want pt-br.

>   One possibility is to have just l-s-pt and l-s-zh and have the
>   metapackage depend on all "sublanguages". A bit of a waste, but
>   keeps the installer side easy.

Those languages are separate and it makes no sense to install them both
at the same time except for a few rare cases (multiuser machine where
you have users from the two different language speaking regions).

Chris