I propose that lomiri-desktop add Recommends: locales-all
I'm submitting a merge request to implement my proposal.

Other Info
========
I made this change for GNOME fairly late in the Debian 13 development
cycle and did not receive any complaints.
https://bugs.debian.org/1089127

The justification is nearly the same for Lomiri. This would enable
Lomiri's first login wizard to show a choice of languages instead of
just providing the language that was used for install. Settings >
Language & Text would allow changing the language. Neither GNOME nor
Lomiri's Settings app provide integration with Debian's packages to
allow easy installation of additional language support.

The instructions for how to install additional language support in
Debian are somewhat complex and may be difficult to find.
https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-reference/ch08.html

Thank you,
Jeremy Bícha

Hi Jeremy,

Please go ahead with this!

Mike

Hi Jeremy,

Please go ahead with this!

Mike

Hello Jeremy,

See the last comment in https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1089127#25:

If you use 'locales-all | locales', you will get all locales per default, but the user is still able to make a sub-selection by using the 'locales' package.

I'm wondering whether it would be good to offer all available languages from Debian, even though some/many Lomiri-specific apps don't offer a translation in that language, or when there is no suitable OSK (On Screen Keyboard) for that language. Perhaps a new package called 'locales-lomiri' or 'lomiri-m17n' could be made that would contain a configuration file with a preselection of the locales for the languages that have a good support in Lomiri.

Then the dependency would become 'locales-lomiri | locales-all | locales'

With kind regards,
Roland Clobus

but my proposal is only Recommends: locales-all . Because it is only a
Recommends, it is possible to easily uninstall locales-all if you want
and use the command-line locales package and its interface instead. I
guess Martin-Éric was annoyed that upgrading to Debian 13 installed
locales-all on his system, but I believe we intentionally want this
behavior by default for people upgrading to the new Debian release.

I think another way of looking at your comment is "why don't all the
other Debian desktops install locales-all too?" Maybe they should but
I'm not working on the other desktops currently. As you're aware,
translation handling in Debian is fragmented. My proposal isn't a
complete solution even for Lomiri users because spellchecking
packages, etc. aren't installed. But I think it makes Lomiri more
usable for computers that might be used with a different language than
was used to install Debian on that computer.

I don't think it's worth the complexity to manage that package. How
could we make the decision to hide a language by default because its
translations aren't complete enough for our default apps? Maybe it's
better for users to have incomplete translations than none at all in
their preferred language? Maybe a language is supported by locales-all
but there aren't any Lomiri translations for that language yet. In the
future, when someone does translate Lomiri into that language, we
would need to remember to manually update our locales-lomiri package.
The locales and locales-all packages are part of Debian's glibc source
package. I think it would be complex to have a different source
package generate locales and conflict with the other binary packges
(because they would be required to ship some of the same file names.)

Thank you,
Jeremy Bícha

I agree that for Lomiri it makes sense to prefer 'locales-all'. But using 'locales-all | locales', even in the Recommends section, would keep the ability for a system administrator to have only a sub-selection of the locales available.

If a system administrator has 'locales' installed and configured and then later installs lomiri-desktop, locales-all will be installed next to locales and that effectively overrides the selection that the administrator made in locales.

In the end we are talking about 200MB in the installed system, for a desktop environment that requires a graphical accelerator card. Since it is not targeting the low-end computers, it would be OK to have locales-all installed, possibly next to locales.

There are a few desktop environments that I know that run a wizard to perform configuration on first installation (Lomiri and GNOME). These wizards look at the installed locales and list these when they offer the user a choice. They do not use the `dpkg --reconfigure locales` option, I guess because that is very specific to Debian. Perhaps something could/should be done there.

I agree, but I wanted to mention an alternative solution :-)

With kind regards,
Roland Clobus

Hello,

Bug #1143609 in lomiri-session reported by you has been fixed in the
Git repository and is awaiting an upload. You can see the commit
message below and you can check the diff of the fix at:

https://salsa.debian.org/ubports-team/lomiri-session/-/commit/8c5a79c03b27b62472230dc5363061698db95dd1
------------------------------------------------------------------------
lomiri-desktop: Recommends locales-all | locales

Closes: #1143609
------------------------------------------------------------------------

(this message was generated automatically)
-- 
Greetings

https://bugs.debian.org/1143609

additional locales offered by locales-all when upgrading.
Nevertheless, I'll add the alternate Recommends: locales if you want
it.

I agree that it would be best if Debian's desktops had integration
with Debian's way of handling locales. This hasn't happened for GNOME
despite this issue existing for many years so this is the workaround
I'm using for now.

I created a merge request because I discovered that we don't install
the screen keyboards for other languages by default either. So I am
proposing we basically Recommend lomiri-keyboard-* . I believe other
Debian desktops offer all keyboard layouts, at least for the available
locales.

https://salsa.debian.org/ubports-team/lomiri-session/-/merge_requests/7

Thank you,
Jeremy Bícha