Here is a summary of the ideas which were exchanged during this thread. 1) Selecting language before country/location/whatever is to be preferred (sorry, Anton...looks like there's a consensus about this)
2) Minimize the questions as much as possible for "simple" cases This is why the language question may offer a country choice at the same time (like current languagechooser). However, we should limit the number of choices for a given language (max 3?) 3) Avoid too long choices list as much as possible (not really easy to use with text frontends) 4) Try to cover all possible cases: see Nikolai's "russian speaking user living in Germany" example 5) Some ambitious schemes are possible (Denis, Joey, Steinar ideas for a "menu") These lead me to two proposals : one quite simple, based on existing *chooser packages, and one more ambitious, with an intermediate menu Simple scheme ------------- -keep the current languagechooser with Petter changes solving the sorting issue. For languages used widely enough in more than one country, offer to choose either a language_country choice, or a language_other choice This gives us three kinds of languages: -languages without any "clear" default country (ex: Arabic) only one entry like this ar Arabic (All countries) -languages with only one clear default country (ex: Czech) two entries: cs_CZ Czech (Czech Republic) cs Czech (Other countries) -languages with at least two countries where they're *widely* used (ex: Spanish) es_ES Spanish (Spain) es_MX Spanish (Mexico) es Spanish (Other countries) No more than 3 choices in addition to the "Other" choice -If a "complete" entry is chosen there, skip countrychooser -Otherwise, go to countrychooser: -First show a short choice of all countries with the given language. This list is built by 'grep "^${LANGUAGE}" /usr/share/i18n/SUPPORTED. For Spanish, that would give: es_AR Argentina es_BO Bolivia es_CL Chile .../... es Other This screen warns about the consequences of choosing "Other" and using an unsupported locale -If a "complete" entry is chosen there, go ahead -If Other is chosen, present the user with the world country list and warn again about unsupported locales This scheme requires: -case by case choices on languagelist for respecting the "no more than 4 choices including Other" rule -some rewrite in countrychooser for handling the supported locales stuff -having the SUPPORTED file from the locales package already installed for building the choices list on the fly (5.5kb lost on root disk) Advantages: simple to implement, may be done quickly Drawbacks : the language selection list will be quite long as we will end up with about 20 supported languages and 2 entries for most of them Ambitious Scheme ---------------- -Switch to languagechooser_ng : 1 language, 1 choice -For each language, propose a default country and show deducted values for timezone, mirror and keyboard: Language selected: English Based on your chosen language, the following default settings can be used for the install. If they are fine, select "Accept". Otherwise you can change them by selecting the appropriate menu entry. Country: United States [ change ] Keyboard: us [ change ] Time Zone: US/Eastern [ change ] Debian mirror: http.us.debian.org [ change ] [ Accept ] This requires a full rewrite of kbd-config and choose-mirror (or dropping them for this new system) as well as some parts of base-config. Advantages: far more logicial : all similar stuff is done at the same time more easy to extend, for instance for handling the charset choice (currently put under the rug.....) Drawbacks : needs lot of work, so probably not easy to implement before next beta always two screens....but several others are saved need some "one language/one country" choices which is not easy for some languages (English at first...:-))) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]