Re: [RFC] Major issue with use of Choices-C

[Frans Pop]

On Wednesday 02 April 2008, Frans Pop wrote:
> This indeed is a real issue.

I've been looking at a solution for this in debconf, but am confused.

# LANG= LANGUAGE=nl LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 ../../test-debconf-C
=> Dialog is displayed in Dutch
@langs = nl:en_us.utf-8:en_us:en.utf-8:en

# LANG= LANGUAGE=en LC_ALL=nl_NL.UTF-8 ../../test-debconf-C
=> Dialog is displayed in Dutch
@langs = en:nl_nl.utf-8:nl_nl:nl.utf-8:nl

(Values for @langs are from /usr/share/perl5/Debconf/Template.pm.)

Why are both cases displayed in Dutch? I would have expected English for the
second.

It seems that because there are no specific -en.UTF-8 templates for English,
Dutch ends up being preferred.
This basically means that for debconf you'll never be able to override a 
specific locale setting using LANGUAGE=C or LANGUAGE=en; you'll always have 
to specify the locale and have LANGUAGE unset.

# LANG= LANGUAGE=en LC_ALL=C ../../test-debconf-C
=> Choices-C values are displayed
@langs = en:c

Here again, C is the first actual match because Choices-C exists.

# LANG= LANGUAGE= LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 ../../test-debconf-C
=> Dialog is displayed in English
@langs = en_us.utf-8:en_us:en.utf-8:en

Here the display is finally correct, but only because there is _no_ match
at all...

I wonder if this patch to /usr/share/perl5/Debconf/Template.pm would be
the correct way to solve this issue:
--- ../../Template.pm   2008-04-02 13:39:54.000000000 +0200
+++ /usr/share/perl5/Debconf/Template.pm        2008-04-02 13:53:17.000000000 
+0200
@@ -279,6 +279,7 @@
 }
 
 my @langs=map { lc $_ } _getlangs();
+print join(":", @langs), "\n";
 
 sub AUTOLOAD {
        (my $field = our $AUTOLOAD) =~ s/.*://;
@@ -294,6 +294,8 @@
                if ($Debconf::Template::i18n && @langs) {
                        my @fields = grep /^\Q$field\E(?:[EMAIL PROTECTED]|$)/, 
$Debconf::Db::templates->fields($this->{template});
                        foreach my $lang (@langs) {
+                               $lang="en" if ($lang eq "c");
+
                                
$ret=$Debconf::Db::templates->getfield($this->{template}, 
$field.'-'.$lang);
                                return $ret if defined $ret;
                                
@@ -306,6 +308,8 @@
                                                }
                                        }
                                }
+
+                               last if ($lang eq "en")
                        }
                } elsif (not $Debconf::Template::i18n && $field !~ /-c$/i) {
                        
$ret=$Debconf::Db::templates->getfield($this->{template}, $field.'-c');

The first hunk makes sure that "Choices-C" fields are never explicitly
selected, but English is used instead. The second hunk solves the second
example I started with by breaking out of the loop if the language is "en"
and thereby ensuring debconf defaults to the standard field.

Cheers,
FJP

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