[Please forgive me for cc'ing to all these addresses, but as you will see I had no choice]
Hi, First, I would like to announce that Debian as been chosen by the Greek Government as the official linux distribution, to be used/proposed in schools, the public sector and perhaps SMEs. Since I am the only developer in this country I took the role of organizing the process of localizing/organizing the existing localization process in order to have a proper and usable system translated in greek. The goal is this: Use the existing Debian base (NO fork of a new distro) but commit the necessary changes (translations, etc) back to Debian in a way that enriches the distribution and helps the situation of localizations for other languages as well. However, due to the nature of the greek language (and other languages that do not use the latin alphabet, eg cyrillic), some further changes have to be made to ensure that the system is ready for use after the installation. For example, since it will be used in schools by young students, we want to avoid telling them to edit configuration files of X to enable writing in greek. So, we have to automate the process of the localization based on the configured locale of the system. The main targets are: console keymap, X, KDE, GNOME. That is, after installation of these packages, if the locale is set appropriately (LANG=el_GR), they should be automatically configured to support the greek language (reading & writing). I have come to the following alternatives: * Modify the existing postinst scripts of the base packages affected (console-tools, kdebase, gnome-core (?), xserver-xfree86 ) to detect the presense of the greek locale and present the user with a question to configure the localization (keyboard, etc). Not my favourite method. * Create a metapackage (autolocale) that depends on all the above packages and automatically configure the localization settings. Actually this might be used by other languages, there's nothing in the process that excludes automation of the localization process for eg. cyrillic or japanese. This should detect the locale and present the user with questions like: "The el_GR locale setting has been detected, would you like to enable support for greek keyboards for the console/X/KDE/GNOME?" I believe the second option would be better but in this case there is the case of actually installing the package, ie declaring as one of the base (?) packages for the installation. And what happens if someone does not want to install gnome or KDE or even X, but would like support for the console? Multiple autolocale packages? Dynamic autolocale dependencies? Suggesting/Recommending instead of depending the other packages? I would appreciate some feedback esp from the maintainers of the packages affected. -- Konstantinos Margaritis
