Un-asked-for-language support

Adam Williamson awilliam at redhat.com
Wed Nov 25 19:01:43 UTC 2009


On Wed, 2009-11-25 at 13:46 -0500, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> On Wed, 2009-11-25 at 09:13 -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
> 
> > 
> > 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.
> 
> That assumes that you are able to navigate the UI without Russian
> support in order to be able to add Russian support. Ie if somebody
> cannot understand English, then giving them an English-only installation
> and saying 'just install Russian later' may not work at all. Even if
> they manage to get their Russian support installed somehow, it'll leave
> a very bad impression.

Um. But you already get Russian support if you select it during
installation, which someone who doesn't speak English would no doubt
have done.

The use cases for adding a new language post-installation are the same
for Russian as I postulated for other languages in my other post: adding
a new user to a multi-user system, and a speaker of a different language
starting to learn a new one. In neither of those cases would the above
be a problem. I can't think of a convincing case where a user who only
spoke Russian would choose to install in English and then try to add
Russian post-install...

the only difference here is that adding non-input-method-based language
post installation is trivial, while adding input-method-based languages
post-installation is not. That is why the stuff for input-method-based
languages always gets installed by default, but stuff for
non-input-method-based languages doesn't.

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




More information about the fedora-test-list mailing list