Subject: bug#64006: Installation frustration weekend

From: Denys Nykula <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 Jun 2023 18:17:35 +0300

Thanks for your comments.  What I can answer right away is that I've
found the issue 59975 and the related commit too, but I still look at
it as a bug, even if the earlier behavior was accidental (i.e. if the
font with Cyrillic support was chosen for its typographic characters).
If a user during the installation selects their language and, after
booting, sees question marks instead of all localized strings, that
affects them more than seeing only ASCII progress bars.

I think the installer should conditionally revert the progress bars (is
that possible?) and set LatGrkCyr-8x16 as the console font, if the
system locale is Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Belarusian, Serbian
or Russian.  That's what Debian-based distributions do; other
approaches are probably possible (choose the default font in the GNU
service at boot time?).  When I learn more of the system internals,
I'll try to make a patch.  Adding console-font-service-type to the Guix
config like the documentation suggests didn't work, it complained that
the service already existed, so I ran setfont manually to get a
minimally working system with which I can work on my documents and
debug the graphical display issue later.  Note to self: learn about
modify-services.