(Dropping CC to debian-cd list) On Tuesday 18 December 2007, Christian Perrier wrote: > Here's a first proposal. Languages are (roughly) grouped by families > (some families could be debatable).
Thanks. > Drawback: why should we put West European first and South Asian or > African last? There is indeed no reason except our western-centric > minds..:-) > > Another idea would be ranking languages by number of speakers. And put Dutch way down the list? Never! :-P Or maybe % of completed po-debconf translations? Or ... I'd say that relative contribution to Debian would be a pretty fair criterion, which probably would come close to justifying the list you proposed... Any grouping (including alphabetical sorting) is going to be unfair to some. To me your proposal makes sense, though I might have put CJK languages a bit higher myself. See below for some further thoughts. To be serious. The best solution would be to prioritize _within_ tasks. Tasksel already supports "key" packages and "regular" packages. IMO it's not really fair that French manpages (random example) come before essential Malayalam desktop support. debian-cd actually respects that distinction by sorting all key packages for all tasks _before_ all regular packages for all tasks. The malayalam-desktop task currently looks as follows: Key: Packages: task-fields Packages-list: ttf-malayalam-fonts scim-tables-additional scim-gtk2-immodule openoffice.org-l10n-ml-in I think a good case could be made for at least the first of those to be made a key package. Not sure about the scim-* packages as I don't know how exactly they are used. The openoffice l10n package should clearly remain as a regular package. I could even see the introduction in tasksel of a third, call it "extra", class that would list "nice to have, but no problem if it's not available" packages" which are either ignored for debian-cd package sorting purposes or are sorted after "regular" packages. Or, alternatively, just creating <lang>-extra tasks that contain such packages and are either listed lower down in task.list or not listed at all (but that would possibly make language task selection in aptitude a bit less obvious). I also wondered about sorting all <lang> tasks before all <lang>-desktop tasks, but am not sure if that would be logical or not. It could improve basic language support for some languages lower down the list, but could also result in just more manpages packages being sorted early. Anyway, my conclusion is that improvements should not be sought by fighting over the sort order, but by improving the way packages between and within tasks are prioritized. In different words: by having a very clear policy of how task files should be written and ensuring that this is done consistently for all languages. IIRC another improvement that could be made includes further splitting the desktop tasks into desktop, desktop-gnome, desktop-kde and desktop-xfce tasks.
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