First needed is having the new language added to
localechooser (the package responsible for
choosing language at the very beginning of a Debian installation).
This will be handled by the Debian Installer i18n coordinators.
This entry should mention the Debian Installer interfaces which this language is available on (text, latin-1 serial, dialog or graphical interface). This choice depends on the needed rendering mechanism for this language.
This defines five categories for languages:
Category 0: languages that can be rendered on any ASCII console. This only includes English by a design decision of Debian Installer. In short, even if a language can be rendered using only ASCII characters, it will not be placed in category 0;
Category 1: languages that can be rendered on any Latin-1 console (several serial terminals). This includes so-called Latin-1 languages;
Category 2: languages that can be rendered at the Linux text console, without the need of a framebuffer terminal.
Category 3: languages that can be rendered at the
Linux text console only by using a framebuffer terminal. The
key point for these languages is the availability of their glyphs in
the bterm-unifont package. These languages should
also not need complex rendering mechanisms such as combination
mechanisms. The difference against Category 2 is the possibility to
display the language at the Linux console without framebuffer.
Category 4: all other languages. Those can only be displayed in a graphical environment.
The localechooser entry also mentions a default
country choice for this language. This country is often the country
where the language is the most spoken (or the official language) and
must be covered by an existing locale. If several supported locales
exist for this language, this has to be mentioned to the
Debian Installer i18n coordinators.
A default locale is also mentioned in this entry. This will be the default choice in case this language is supported in several locales. In case a new locale has to be written in the former initial steps, this default locale can be this new locale, otherwise it must be an already existing locale.
With all this information, the Debian Installer i18n coordinators will write the new entry
in localechooser. They will also add the
language code to the packages/po/PROSPECTIVE file
(see Section 6.3, “
Prospective languages
”).
For this step to be completed, the new entry must exist in
localechooser. It should be commented until the
initial steps are completed.
The Debian Installer i18n coordinators will record this information in the supported
languages list by changing the nlp_step field
value to localechooser_entry.