countrychooser hacking

Tonight some hacking on countrychooser. Lots of cleanups, and some very nasty hacks to make it group the large country list into regions. Something feels a bit wrong about substituting stuff into po files on the fly, and then search and replacing with non-breaking spaces in the generated templates file. But hey, it works.

Also I found out that debconf seems to eat those non-breaking spaces when loading templates. cdebconf does not. Probably perl utf-8 DWIM nonsense.

It seems that many changes to d-i nowadays, such as the one above, involve more time spent working on i18n issues than on the actual code. I guess that's ok, but I'd rather work on the actual code. I'm glad we have people like Denis Barbier who take up the slack of folks like me on i18n issues.

I developed a very scary theory this morning about the X bug that has been plaguing my laptop since this fall. This is the weirdest bug I think I've ever seen, and it looks like it may be a bug in the transmeta code morpher. Possibly; I hope not.