language input/display support metapackages (without translations)
| Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ubuntu |
Fix Released
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned | ||
Bug Description
Overview
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Ubuntu should make translations and input/display support packages available separately.
Use Cases
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Elika is a native English speaker who has studied three other languages: French, Chinese, and Persian. She wants to be able to write in those languages, but she has no need or desire to localize her system. In fact, she wouldn't understand computer interfaces in those languages anyway, and certainly has no use for the translated help files. She wants to install input support (like keyboard layouts and IMEs) and other writing tools (like a spelling dictionary) for these languages, only--not the full set of GNOME/KDE/
fantasai focuses on i18n issues in CSS support. She often needs to type examples and test cases in different scripts, even though she doesn't really understand the languages they represent. She doesn't need translations either, but she also needs support for input and display of many scripts. She would rather not fill up disk space with translations she doesn't need, since she'd rather use that space for development libraries and other useful things.
| Micah Cowan (micahcowan) wrote | #1 |
| fantasai (fantasai) wrote | #2 |
| Micah Cowan (micahcowan) wrote | #3 |
The current case is already as you describe. Input methods and keyboard layouts are quite separate from the translation metapackages. All of the keyboard layouts are installed already on a fresh system; input methods for Chinese and the like involve installing scim and related software. None of this has anything to do with the translation packages.
For instance, I personally do some occasional typing in greek, hebrew, or Japanese, and also frequently need to use latin-language diacritical marks. For greek and hebrew, I simply add the greek and hebrew layouts to my available layouts, in Preferences -> Keyboard -> Layouts. I also configure in the Layout Options tab, keys to switch between layouts, and a Compose key so I can hit <compose key> ' e to produce é. For Japanese, I've installed scim-anthy, scim-gtk2-immodule, scim-qtimm, and im-switch, and use im-switch -z en_US -s scim to enable it (takes effect when I log out/back in).
Since this behavior is already in place, I'm closing this bug out. Thanks!