Define & apply clear criteria for including dictionaries, fonts and language packs
_Originally created by @intrigeri on [#15807 (Redmine)](https://public-redmine-archive.tails.boum.org/code/issues/15807)_
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 tails/tails#15023 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 (tails/tails#9956).
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 tails/tails#15543: 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
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