Breezy installer resolution

[Colin Watson]

On Wed, Sep 14, 2005 at 03:41:08PM -0400, Alvin Thompson wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-09-14 at 01:21 -0700, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> > This issue has nothing to do with the font.
> 
> i'm thinking of an alternative solution. if you can change fonts after
> the kernel has loaded, why not create a custom font with just the
> characters necessary to display the names of all the languages? for
> 'english', you would just need 7 characters: e-n-g-l-i-s-h. you would
> only need 4 additional characters for 'français', since the 'i', 'n' and
> 's' is already added for english and the 'a' is repeated. you get the
> idea.

Some languages have double-width characters in their fonts, which would
cause further pain here. I'm afraid I'm not really interested in
attempting or maintaining this kind of complicated kludge; making it
work in cdebconf, bterm, localechooser (especially at the same time as
localechooser's parallel function in oem-config!), main-menu, and so on
would be likely to make the whole installer less reliable for the
benefit of a few pieces of hardware that can probably be dealt with by
(fundamentally) simpler and more correct fixes in the kernel.

Maybe with an installer written in C talking to the framebuffer
directly, this kind of thing would be practical - but we've moved on
quite some distance from there. Using higher-level abstractions for the
installer has a huge number of benefits, but it does mean that the
maintenance costs of special-purpose hacks for individual installer
components become too high, and we have to concentrate on more general
solutions. Fortunately, in the end that's usually the right approach.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]