Regression in getting fully translated Ubuntu installation - what to do for karmic?

[Timo Jyrinki]

Hi,

CC:ing ubuntu-translators just to get interested people on-board, no
need to continue CC:ing.

Please look at https://bugs.launchpad.net/language-selector/+bug/434173
- do you think I'm missing something, can the report be refined? The
new way of handling supporting translations, writing aids etc. moves
them from package dependencies to language-selector. However, it means
that new installations of Ubuntu do not get the full language support
at install time, even when connected to Internet. My previous guidance
for those reading an installation guide has been to enable Internet
connection before starting the installer to get eg. Finnish support.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/language-selector-karmic describes the user
should get a notification after installation. First of all, I tested
it and it seems non-functional at the moment (a bug on its own).
Secondly, I do strongly think it's not enough - for example 50% of the
users could easily not be interested at the one-time popup, forgetting
about it - but they will run into a bad Ubuntu experience once they
are in a situation of lacking a spell-checker for example, or reading
English documentation.

Also, it does not seem Ubuntu tools currently are very error-proof in
case of lacking an Internet connection - they will simply fail and no
new notifications (or guiding to connect to Internet) are given.

To match Ubuntu 9.04 functionality, I think Ubuntu installer should
call language-selector to install full language support at the
installation time, if the Internet connection is available. This would
result in a similar behavior to 9.04, with the pop-up being there to
hopefully help those who didn't enable the Internet connection (there
is no guidance for it when starting from the Live CD).

Besides "am I correct or could you refine the bug report", I'm
interested in against which packages the bug should be filed? Is it a
a) bug against language-selector (to have some silent "--fix-missing"
to be used by the installer), b) bug against installer (launch
language-selector, silent or not), c) bug against update-manager (I
would like to have more than just one pop-up about installing full
support - for example, update-manager could completely automatically
download full support together with the first updates for a single
time), d) bug report against The Whole World (language-selector +
lang-pack-o-matic changes + ...) since the problem appeared in the
first place? If you know the answer or part of it, please go ahead and
refine the bug.

I'm also interested if these were thought about during creation of the
Karmic language-selector blueprint? The popup notification is not
enough IMHO, and it wasn't enough in 9.04 either. But especially as
the situation is now worse in 9.10 than it was in 9.04, can we bring
it to 9.04 level somehow? After that, we might think how to actually
make it Just Work for lucid (I'm thinking about guiding the user by
hand to connect to Internet etc).

-Timo