To libtext-iconv-perl maintainer: Steve, does libtext-iconv-perl in fact need the locales package to work?
On Wed, Sep 11, 2002 at 06:55:48PM +0900, Tomohiro KUBOTA wrote: > However, I have one concern. Debconf is one of softwares which is > used in early stage of Debian installation. Thus, Debconf should > not depend on many/large packages/data. > > Encoding conversion is a relatively heavy process. I mean, collection > of conversion tables is large. > > I don't know if iconv (I can use "libtext-iconv-perl" package) or > encoding conversion in gettext work well without "locales" package > or not. Do you have any idea? > > If it *needs*, it means that Debconf cannot use encoding conversion > in small systems or early stage of installation. Even in such cases, > Debconf should work fairly good in popular locales (like ISO-8859-15 > for French and EUC-JP for Japanese). > > If it *doesn't need*, we can freely design new Debconf to use iconv > or gettext. If the package really needs locales, then I guess we have the following solution: since anyone except those who use "C" locale in fact need "locales" package to use their national locale, we can have debconf use libtext-iconv-perl _conditionally_ only if recoding is needed (i.e. user uses non-UTF-8-compatible locale, which probably means anything other than UTF8 itself or "C" locale"). This way debconf could only recommend or suggest locales (and libtext-iconv-perl), but anyone using legacy charset locale (i.e. iso-*, EUC-JP, ...) wold in fact need locales anyway. One more benefit is we move UT8 transition forward :-) Of course we would still need to force libtext-iconv-perl and locales retrevial and installation before the reboot for people who choose a non-"C" locale. Marcin -- Marcin Owsiany <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://marcin.owsiany.pl/ GnuPG: 1024D/60F41216 FE67 DA2D 0ACA FC5E 3F75 D6F6 3A0D 8AA0 60F4 1216 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
