ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Rodney Dawes <rodney.dawes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 2014-04-17 at 10:24 -0400, Kyle Nitzsche wrote:
> So to be clear, I don't really care if it is debs or not. It's just that debs
> already work (except for the requirement to add translations/languages at
> runtime). And we have a fully functioning set of things that enable:
> * customized images (only include the languages you want)
> * customized packages (that add features and just those features' translations
> to a pkg while falling back to the translations provided for the pkg by lang packs).

This is the case at the moment, because it is convenient at the moment.
I don't think it will continue to remain that way in the future, as we
move closer and closer to having a converged system.

> The only thing we do not have now (as previously mentioned in this thread) is
> adding a language at runtime that it not baked into the system image. Can an
> overlay file system solve this by allowing language deb installation (by a
> language selector settings widget like in 'classic' now) into a read-write area
> that is joined with the read-only area?

I don't know if an overlay is the way to fix that, and I don't know that
we want to enable the installation of debs for this at all. I also don't
think it's necessarily important to solve it right now. It needs a lot
more thinking and discussion, as it's not a trivial problem to solve. I
do think it is important to mention it and provide a little thought on
it right now though, as we don't want to solve the problem of i18n in
scopes in one way, and then solve the enabling of non-default languages
in another way in the future, and have to go back and re-implement a lot
of things, because those conflict.

> Yes: Perhaps the lang packs for Ubuntu Desktop would not be the same as for
> Ubuntu for phones/tablets.

I don't think that's what we want. That would be working against the
goal of having a converged Ubuntu image. It might be a viable short-term
option to optimize the phone images for the initial Meizu/Bq phones, but
I don't think it is a viable long-term goal for Ubuntu. OEMs/providers
might want to have custom images with certain languages by default, but
for the images one downloads from ubuntu.com, it seems like it would be
the same image, whether it's for installing on a phone, tablet, or PC,
once we've hit the convergence goal.