[Debian-in-workers] Sorting languages in the tasks list

[Christian Perrier]

Quoting Frans Pop (elendil at planet.nl):

> > 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...


I thought a little bit deeper about the various options we have. I
finally concluded that the grouping by families has no real advantage
and is anyway quite arbitrary.

It is very hard to find a sort method that doesn't include any
arbitrary choice by the person who makes the choice.

I finally concluded the the best option could be sorting languages wrt
the moment D-I (and boot floppies earlier) included the relevant
translation.

This is roughly given a credit for the "contributed early to Debian" part.

I think that I have enough memory of the time each language was
activated in D-I (we have such info in languages.xml) and can come up
with something. It will be probably hard to sort between the very
first ones (those that were supported in woody) because I think noone
remembers whether Dutch appeared before French, but that's of low
importance and we'll then use the alphabetical order.

Would that be OK?

Generally speaking, there are quite few reasons for putting the <lang>
tasks before the <lang-desktop>: most of the <lang> tasks are made of
dictionaries and/or manpages while -desktop ones are translations
and/or fonts or input methods, which I consider more important for a
given language support.

That would bring:

-desktop tasks, sorted according to the moment D-I was translated to
that language

<lang> tasks, sorted with the same criteria


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