Suppose you install Ubuntu and select a language other than English (it’s known to happen!). This will install the general and the GNOME language packs, translated LibreOffice help, and so on. Now, install a KDE package or GIMP. You’ll notice that the new application is not translated and has no help available for your language. The next time you open the language selector from control-center it would tell you that you miss some language support and offer to install it, but this has been pretty indiscoverable, and we really can do better.

Today’s language-selector upload provides an aptdaemon plugin which automatically marks corresponding language support packages (translated help, dictionaries, spell checker modules, and translations themselves) for installation for any newly installed package, for all languages that are configured on your system.

For example, I have German and English locales on my system, and no KDE packages. Before, installing GIMP got me just that:

`Suppose you install Ubuntu and select a language other than English (it’s known to happen!). This will install the general and the GNOME language packs, translated LibreOffice help, and so on. Now, install a KDE package or GIMP. You’ll notice that the new application is not translated and has no help available for your language. The next time you open the language selector from control-center it would tell you that you miss some language support and offer to install it, but this has been pretty indiscoverable, and we really can do better.

Today’s language-selector upload provides an aptdaemon plugin which automatically marks corresponding language support packages (translated help, dictionaries, spell checker modules, and translations themselves) for installation for any newly installed package, for all languages that are configured on your system.

For example, I have German and English locales on my system, and no KDE packages. Before, installing GIMP got me just that:

`

Now it automatically installs the corresponding localized help:

``Suppose you install Ubuntu and select a language other than English (it’s known to happen!). This will install the general and the GNOME language packs, translated LibreOffice help, and so on. Now, install a KDE package or GIMP. You’ll notice that the new application is not translated and has no help available for your language. The next time you open the language selector from control-center it would tell you that you miss some language support and offer to install it, but this has been pretty indiscoverable, and we really can do better.

Today’s language-selector upload provides an aptdaemon plugin which automatically marks corresponding language support packages (translated help, dictionaries, spell checker modules, and translations themselves) for installation for any newly installed package, for all languages that are configured on your system.

For example, I have German and English locales on my system, and no KDE packages. Before, installing GIMP got me just that:

`Suppose you install Ubuntu and select a language other than English (it’s known to happen!). This will install the general and the GNOME language packs, translated LibreOffice help, and so on. Now, install a KDE package or GIMP. You’ll notice that the new application is not translated and has no help available for your language. The next time you open the language selector from control-center it would tell you that you miss some language support and offer to install it, but this has been pretty indiscoverable, and we really can do better.

Today’s language-selector upload provides an aptdaemon plugin which automatically marks corresponding language support packages (translated help, dictionaries, spell checker modules, and translations themselves) for installation for any newly installed package, for all languages that are configured on your system.

For example, I have German and English locales on my system, and no KDE packages. Before, installing GIMP got me just that:

`

Now it automatically installs the corresponding localized help:

``

I am using aptdcon here as it points out the effect better than software-center doing all this in the background, but both use aptdaemon, so the effect will be the same.

Likewise, installing the first KDE-ish package will automatically install the KDE language packs:

Today’s [language-selector][1] upload provides an [aptdaemon plugin][2] which automatically marks corresponding language support packages (translated help, dictionaries, spell checker modules, and translations themselves) for installation for any newly installed package, for all languages that are configured on your system.

For example, I have German and English locales on my system, and no KDE packages. Before, installing GIMP got me just that:

`Suppose you install Ubuntu and select a language other than English (it’s known to happen!). This will install the general and the GNOME language packs, translated LibreOffice help, and so on. Now, install a KDE package or GIMP. You’ll notice that the new application is not translated and has no help available for your language. The next time you open the language selector from control-center it would tell you that you miss some language support and offer to install it, but this has been pretty indiscoverable, and we really can do better.

Today’s [language-selector][1] upload provides an [aptdaemon plugin][2] which automatically marks corresponding language support packages (translated help, dictionaries, spell checker modules, and translations themselves) for installation for any newly installed package, for all languages that are configured on your system.

For example, I have German and English locales on my system, and no KDE packages. Before, installing GIMP got me just that:

` 

Now it automatically installs the corresponding localized help:

``Suppose you install Ubuntu and select a language other than English (it’s known to happen!). This will install the general and the GNOME language packs, translated LibreOffice help, and so on. Now, install a KDE package or GIMP. You’ll notice that the new application is not translated and has no help available for your language. The next time you open the language selector from control-center it would tell you that you miss some language support and offer to install it, but this has been pretty indiscoverable, and we really can do better.

Today’s [language-selector][1] upload provides an [aptdaemon plugin][2] which automatically marks corresponding language support packages (translated help, dictionaries, spell checker modules, and translations themselves) for installation for any newly installed package, for all languages that are configured on your system.

For example, I have German and English locales on my system, and no KDE packages. Before, installing GIMP got me just that:

`Suppose you install Ubuntu and select a language other than English (it’s known to happen!). This will install the general and the GNOME language packs, translated LibreOffice help, and so on. Now, install a KDE package or GIMP. You’ll notice that the new application is not translated and has no help available for your language. The next time you open the language selector from control-center it would tell you that you miss some language support and offer to install it, but this has been pretty indiscoverable, and we really can do better.

Today’s [language-selector][1] upload provides an [aptdaemon plugin][2] which automatically marks corresponding language support packages (translated help, dictionaries, spell checker modules, and translations themselves) for installation for any newly installed package, for all languages that are configured on your system.

For example, I have German and English locales on my system, and no KDE packages. Before, installing GIMP got me just that:

` 

Now it automatically installs the corresponding localized help:

`` 

I am using `aptdcon` here as it points out the effect better than software-center doing all this in the background, but both use aptdaemon, so the effect will be the same.

Likewise, installing the first KDE-ish package will automatically install the KDE language packs:

This is now possible because I rewrote the check-language-support logic from scratch; the old code was very slow, hard to read and a nightmare to maintain, and also depended on a lot of data files. The new code is very fast (figuring out all missing language support packages for all installed packages for all available locales takes 8 ms on my system), and has full test coverage.

While the check-language-support program still works (I rewrote it using the new API), it is easier and probably a lot faster to just use the new API now, e. g. in our Ubiquity installer.

Say goodbye to this 2.5 year old bug!