[Debian-in-workers] Malayalam fonts are not getting installed

[Frans Pop]

(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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