Comment 0 for bug 1520278

Revision history for this message
Didier Roche-Tolomelli (didrocks) wrote : Readding some default languages to Ubuntu desktop CD

Back in the day we were still producing Ubuntu desktop ISO being able to burn on the CD, we had to fight a lot every cycle to keep the size reasonables, while still having a reasonable offer in term of default languages on the CD. However, at some point, this wasn't possible anymore and we dropped many languages as our default installation.

We lifted this image size restriction some cycles ago (and decided that the ISO will be used on DVDs or USB sticks) but didn't reintroduce languages that we dropped by then.

More and more locos (in particular italian and french) don't do their own ISO respin anymore due to issues with UEFI.

In addition, some CD image time decision are still on the live (like german and portuguese are installed on all archs but amd64… which is the most widespread archs). We should use this time to cleanswap this.

Finally, when we install support for one language, we should install it fully. It means that opening "language selector" should tell you that the language is fully installed for the default application selection/dictionnaries and that you don't rely on an Internet connexion to complete your locale installation.
For this, we are going to use /usr/share/language-selector/data/pkg_depends (used by language-selector) and shipping them in live seed task for every dependent package that we shipped by default.

I propose we try and asset around the following criterias to decide what to install by default:
- Number of native speaker of one language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers
- Popularity contest to assess what languages are using our community the most: http://popcon.ubuntu.com/by_vote. This as well will enable us to see communities (I think German people as an example) which are traditionally using their systems in English, contrary to others (italian, french), which are switching locale to their native languages.
- Previous ubuntu versions we shipped locale for (I propose we look at 10.04 LTS)
- Additional size on the ISO. We will approximate packagesize ~= size taken once extracted files are compressed in the squashfs.

Finally, remember that those locales are only part of the live. The chosen one will be present on the installed system, but not other ones. So no extra space on the installed target.