Un-asked-for-language support

[Adam Williamson]

On Wed, 2009-11-25 at 18:07 +0100, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> On 11/25/2009 04:17 PM, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> > On 11/25/2009 08:10 PM, Karel Volný wrote:
> >> On Wednesday 25 of November 2009 14:33:45 Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> >>> So you want the default selection to be English only. I think
> >>>   350 MB of disk space isn't worth the hassle for majority of
> >>>   Fedora users (yes, the majority is not English) but that's
> >>>   just me. I will stop here.
> >>
> >> ahem, but *the majority* does not need support for *all* the
> >> languages
> 
> > Sure but then you are back again to picking only English by default
> > because you can't guess which languages are needed by which users and I
> > don't think it is a good choice.
> 
> Why not asking the user/installer for it?
> 
> > Face it, packages are always going to
> > contain locale information which you don't need.
> 
> Right, but this isn't an excuse for a bloated default package install set.

The distinction here is between languages which require input methods
and languages which don't. If you want to add, say, Russian
post-install, it's easy: install appropriate fonts - which you can do by
just going to a Russian website, thanks to PackageKit - and set an
appropriate keyboard layout.

For languages which require input methods, it isn't that simple. There's
no mechanism in Fedora, KDE or GNOME for installing and configuring the
input methods for languages which require them, post distribution
installation. Just installing appropriate fonts and a keyboard layout
isn't enough for writing in these languages.

The post-install case is simple enough: multi-user system, new user who
speaks Korean (or whichever input-method based language you like). Or,
as quite often happens, someone who has an existing Fedora installation
and decides to start learning Japanese or something, and wants to write
it on their computer.

There could be a better solution to this written, probably, if someone
had the time and dedication, but it's not simple. (I'm not entirely sure
why the input methods themselves need the fonts to be installed,
though).

-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net