Hi, I'm planning to work on a patch which generates the locale for the selected language at the prebaseconfig stage. There are some pretty good reasons to do so:
* As a critical step for i18n, the locale generation should not be part
of a kludgy script like termwrap. It deserves a well-defined conf
script on its own right.
* Some initialization scripts of the installed system may need to reach
the locale info found in the /etc/environment file. Indeed, this is
the case for console-screen.sh of console-tools and another bug report
(#258681) has been filed for keymap.sh of console-common, which refers
to this file. In the current implementation, /etc/environment is
created at the end of the base-config, which introduces a problem for
unicode consoles as explained below.
* We modified the keymap handling to resolve a (IMO) serious d-i bug
(#251550) somewhat related with the unicode consoles. It seems that a
similar solution will be needed for languages using a UTF-8 locale
(confirmed for tr_TR.UTF-8). The console must be in the unicode mode
under the unicode locales, but _unless_ we consider to rehack [1] the
keymap loading mechanism, /etc/environment is the only source to
extract the locale info which mandates to install it in the first
stage d-i and later use it to switch the unicode mode. In fact, IMHO,
such an approach would present the most simple and natural solution
for the problem at hand.
* By moving the locale generation code to prebaseconfig, one of the
central duties of termwrap will be transfered to this package, so we
will be able to simplify the termwrap. According to my tests, I can
safely state that, termwrap would not be needed at all for languages
having a charset of ISO-8859-[1-15]. But it would have to be used
mainly for Asian and Cyrillic consoles (not sure for the latter).
As a side note, please notice that we wouldn't need to touch the
termwrap in an effort to simplify it, till the proposed patch matures
enough.
So, have you any comments or objections?
Regards,
[1] The current code base of 'loadkeys' is rather messy, which makes
such modifications difficult.
--
roktas
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