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Define & apply clear criteria for including dictionaries, fonts and language packs

Originally created by @intrigeri on #15807 (Redmine)

Historically we included dictionaries (hunspell-*), fonts and LibreOffice language packs (libreoffice-l10n-*) for each language that was on the short list in the old Greeter we used to ship during the Tails 2.x era. We have no such list anymore. I don’t remember where this short list came from anyway, most likely the reasons behind it don’t matter so much anymore. Additionally we install all Thunderbird language packs.

Due to how our Tor Browser localization script is implemented, while working on #15023 (closed) I’ve added dictionaries for the new locales supported by Tor Browser (da, he, ko, nl, pl, sv); but I did not install LibreOffice language packs nor fonts for those. And now Tor Browser 8.0a10 supports 5 new locales (ca, ga-IE, id, is, nb-NO), most of which have hunspell dictionaries in Debian. I was going to automatically add them to our list of packages, then wondered what I should do, and decided to not install these dictionaries: it’s easier to decide to add them later than to decide to remove them later.

So, I’d like us to answer these questions:

  1. what’s the criteria for adding new spellchecker dictionaries in Tails?
  2. what’s the criteria for adding new LibreOffice or Thunderbird language packs in Tails? Note that they’re necessary to have a translated UI.
  3. what’s the criteria for adding new fonts in Tails? Note: fonts are necessary to display our GNOME desktop correctly; some font families (Noto, Roboto) have very broad coverage and could be a reasonable fallback (#9956 (closed)).
  4. Once we have such criteria, shall we apply them to the languages we already ship support files for? FTR the current list, wrt. dictionaries and LibreOffice l10n packs, is: ar, da, de, en_US, es, fa, fr, he, it, ko, nl, pl, pt-br, ru, sv, vi, zh-CN. Add to this all available Thunderbird language packs. I did not look at the list of scripts supported by the fonts we ship. I suspect these two lists are not fully consistent.

Criteria we might want to use:

  • Is our website translated (or in good way to be) in this language? Rationale: consistency; if it looks like a language is well supported by looking at our website, then perhaps it should be well supported when starting Tails.
  • Number of native speakers worldwide
  • Number of Tor users (yeah, that’s per-country, not per-language, but perhaps that’s good enough)
  • Size of the support files
  • Impact of the missing support files (e.g. unusable desktop or LibreOffice vs. not the nicest looking fonts ever)

I think this is related to ASP and #15543 (closed): once it’s easy enough to add the necessary packages to one’s Tails, perhaps we can raise the bar for inclusion by default. Ideally we could hint the user towards installing the needed packages depending on the locale they chose but let’s please avoid designing an over-engineered solution that will be added to our roadmap and then postponed year after year.

Feature Branch: feature/15807-trimmed-and-consistent-l10n-support+force-all-tests, greeter:feature/9956-noto

Related issues

Edited by intrigeri
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