First of all, sorry for just putting ideas in this mail and not propose any implementation. I'm afraid my skills are too low for proposing anything but really bad code. Not speaking of time lacking..:-)
The current language list (which is the very first prompt a user "sees" when installing Debian) is not really satisfactory (imho, of course). The list is alphabetically sorted with all choices being translation of the english sentence "Choose this to proceed in xxxxxx" Thus, hungarian comes first (because of its leading "A"), then french variants (because I translated as "Choisissez" which comes before "Choose") and so on... There were a few proposals recently for changing this to simpler choices, for instance only language names. The variants also induce some confusion by macking the list a bit too long. Here are my proposal : -change this to a 2 stage process : first choose the language (e.g. "Français"). Then choose the country variant (is "Français" is chosen, the user chooses between Belgique, Canada, France, Luxembourg, Suisse) -simplfy the sentence : just keep the language names (translated, just like they currently are) -find a rule for sorting languages : -English (which is the default) should come first -Sort other languages. Below are some proposals: -alphabetically (not easy : where should double-byte languages go?) -by translation status in Debian: -first sorting key-->translation status for d-i -second sorting key-->combination of translation status for debconf templates and programs translations (by using http://www.debian.org/intl/l10n/ pages when they will be updated again -by numbers of people speaking these languages in the world. Many references may be found on this topic. For instance, by googling a bit, I found http://www.photius.com/rankings/languages2.html: -Chinese, Mandarin -Spanish -English -Arabic -Bengali -Hindi -Portuguese -Russian -Japanese -German -Chinese, Wu -Javanese -Korean -French -Turkish -Vietnamese .../... we have 50 languages listed This reference is an ethnological reference which lists the number of people *really* speaking the given language. This is not a sum of the populations of countries for which the given language is among the official languages of the country (I found that statistic also, but only for the Top10 languages : http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0775272.html#A0774735) Does somebody have comments on this? If the 2 stage process is agreed, we will need someone for implementing it in languagechooser. Joey, Petter, Tollef, you have for sure a valuable opinion on this as you are listed as the major contributors for languagechooser... -- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]