[gentoo-dev] Handling of LINGUAS

[Lars Weiler]

Hi devs,

I would like to discuss the handling of the LINGUAS
variable.  Currently we have a couple of packages which
support this variable, with OpenOffice, kde-i18n and
mozilla-* as those with the most supported settings.

As the PowerPC-team still support a packages-CD with
pre-compiled packages based on the Gentoo Reference
Platform, I want to provide applications with pre-built
translations.  So I set a quite large environment
LINGUAS-variable with the most common languages:

LINGUAS="en ar de en_GB en_US es fr it jp nl pl pt pt_BR ru
zh_CN zh_TW" ¹

I came until building kde-i18n, then the process died.
That's caused by the kde-i18n ebuild which tests the given
LINGUAS and dies when there is no or an unsupported language
set.  For instance, kde-i18n does not support "en", but
"en_GB", Openoffice supports "en", "en_GB" and "en_US".  But
when I omit "en" in my LINGUAS, some other packages will not
install this language -- and I guess you don't want your
FireFox in Arabic or German ;-)

I propose that package-maintainers should check and fix
their ebuilds, that they do not fail on unsupported given
LINGUAS-settings.  Just strip them and continue the
installation.

Comments?

Regards, Lars

¹) firefox and thunderbird set the first given language as
default; on the 2006.1-release I ordered a smaller list
alphabetically and so both applications showed a German menu
(as de was the first set language) on their first start.
Later on I added "ar" (Arabic) to the list and I had, guess,
everything switched from the left to the right with
interesting ornaments in between…

-- 
Lars Weiler  <pylon@g.o>  [phone]
Gentoo Linux PowerPC    : Strategical Lead and Release Engineer
Gentoo Infrastructure   : CVS Administrator