F19 Installer a little better, but...

[Adam Williamson]

On Thu, 2013-06-20 at 16:01 -0400, Peter Jones wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 13, 2013 at 05:54:33PM -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
> > On Fri, 2013-06-14 at 12:39 +1200, Gavin Flower wrote:
> > > On 14/06/13 12:31, Adam Williamson wrote:
> > > 
> > > > On Fri, 2013-06-14 at 12:28 +1200, Gavin Flower wrote:
> > > > 
> > > > > Well, I configured the wireless network prior to get to the
> > > > > installation summary with all the spokes in the previous screen, and
> > > > > it correctly got the assigned host name & IPv4 address.  So I asumed
> > > > > the network was up.  Also from that point on, I did nothing explicit
> > > > > to do with networks, and I has able to ssh in after reboot!
> > > > Could be a bug with the geoloc stuff in the case where you need the
> > > > pre-hub network screen, I guess. Does the network config screen come up
> > > > *before* or *after* the "Welcome" screen?
> > 
> > > The welcome screen comes up first: WELCOME TO FEDORA 19-TC3.
> > 
> > Ah. Well then obviously it can't guess your language based on your
> > location at that point, as you haven't configured the network yet.
> > 
> > This seems reasonable - it's probably better to do it this way around
> > than the other (which would make the geoloc work, but require people to
> > navigate the network spoke in English first).
> > 
> > If it doesn't re-do the geoloc stuff to get the timezone at least
> > correct after you complete the network screen, though, that could be
> > considered a bug.
> 
> Just FYI, we have another method of guessing language now as well - *if*
> you've got a UEFI machine, and the firmware vendor has set the language
> the firmware is in, and that language is in our list, we'll use it.  So
> if e.g. you buy a new PC in the middle of China, it's possible that it'll
> come up in Simplified Chinese.
> 
> So far I've seen a couple of machines that at least support different
> languages reasonably well in the firmware *and* correctly set the values
> that tell us what language they're using, but I haven't seen anything
> default to non-en_US.  That said, I'm in Massachusetts, so the odds
> aren't that high that I would.
> 
> Obviously, this is just for language, not timezone.

On general principles, I'm rather reluctant to trust *firmware
providers* of all people to be a reliable source of...well...anything at
all. Is this really a good idea? Doesn't Murphy's Law Of Firmware
Engineers pretty much predict that someone is going to set the 'firmware
language' variable to Chinese even when the firmware's actually in
English, or something? This is the kind of thing we want to have very
few 'false positive' results on, given that if we get it wrong, there is
a very high chance the first screen of the installer will inexplicably
look like gibberish. I think people are usually willing to tolerate it
defaulting to English when they speak something else - English is pretty
much the unofficial lingua franca of Tech In General, if nothing else,
everyone's pretty much resigned to it by now - but people (of whatever
nationality) are far more likely to find it problematic if it defaults
to a non-English language which is incorrect. It may even be politically
sensitive in some cases (hiya, Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere!)

Frankly I'm not 100% convinced that it's a good idea to try and guess
language even from a fairly reliable geolocation mechanism like ours.
It's still not 100% reliable - people behind corporate VPNs can be
routed through just about anywhere - and even when it gives a correct
geographic location, what the hell do you do for, say, India? Where
you'd need to have house-level accuracy to have a snowball's chance in
hell of guessing what language someone speaks? I mean, even the US's hat
is officially a bilingual country, and the US itself is pretty much
unofficially bilingual at this point (please don't take this as a
political statement, sensitive USians, it's a purely pragmatic one: we
can't 100% safely assume someone wants to install Fedora in English just
because they are geographically located in the United States).

I know vpodzime is thinking of changing the whole language/location
logic for F20, which is probably a good thing. If we have a question
which is simply 'what country are you in?' - as distinct from 'what
language do you speak?' - it would seem reasonable (though still
somewhat politically fraught, in a few cases...) to guess that from
geolocation, and populate the 'most likely' list of languages from
langtable's association of languages with countries. But just going
straight to guessing a language, cold, based on location, seems to me a
mechanism that's prone to failing in embarrassing ways. Apologies I
didn't bring this up sooner - we may have to eat it for F19, but I'm
just _really_ not sure it's a great idea.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net