ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[James Henstridge <james.henstridge@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 2:18 AM, Rodney Dawes
<rodney.dawes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Mon, 2014-04-21 at 19:54 +0200, Rasmus Eneman wrote:
>> As a user I want to be able to buy a phone anywhere and just go to
>> System Settings and choose or install my language. So languepacks
>> needs to be supported and be installable individually. If this is by
>> deb or something else doesn't matter. The only app that would be
>> allowed to install language packs is system settings so if it's using
>> debs doesn't mean that users can install debs.
>> Of cource the language packs needs to be trimmed to only contain
>> what's in the image. Apps needs to bring their own translations.
>
> Actually, yes it does mean that langpacks won't be installable, because
> only root can install debs, and the rootfs partition must be writable,
> which it is not. The / partition is read-only, and thus nothing can be
> installed to it, without enabling some sort of "developer mode" to make
> it writable. You certainly don't want to have to enable developer mode,
> or plug in via USB and use developer tools, to be able to install the
> language you need, when you buy a new phone.

It's clear that language packs in their current form are not suitable
for phone-style read only images.  That's true but not very
interesting.

The interesting question is whether we want to use language packs on
the phone.  If we do want to, I'm sure we can find technical solutions
to the problems you've raised.

We can always bind mount more locations in the file system to
read/write storage if we wanted e.g. /usr/share/locale-langpack to be
writable.  And if .deb packages are a problem, we could probably work
out an alternative there too.

James.