Missed tag and import improvements from distro packages

[Fantu]

I was re-evaluating in Debian regarding a difficulty/shortcoming that has been there for many years, the language setting from the gui.
In past I had discarded mintlocale because it seemed specific to the distro but if I continue not to find better alternatives I think I will evaluate the use of mintlocale in Debian.

I've seen that some distros seem to use mintlocale, such as Fedora.
I saw that he made some fixes and patches that could be partially useful to have here and improve support for any non-Debian (or derived) distros as well.
@leigh123linux what do you think?

I also saw that recent tags are missing, on fedora it remained old, at the latest tag while for example Arch used the tarball from the mint repository as a workaround.
@mtwebster Can you please add latest tag and future ones please?

[Fantu]

I did some research with Claude's help, but I didn't find any independent alternatives. Two are close, but they require GNOME components, which I don't want.

I had Claude analyze how all the necessary language settings work in various places in Debian and Ubuntu (since Ubuntu has differences). He reported several issues with MintLocale. I'd better take a closer look, even manually, because it seems strange that MintLocale has several problems, including one that seems serious, involving the lack of support for /var/lib/locales/supported.d/ in Debian (I assume other distros as well, since it seems Ubuntu-specific). This seems strange to me, given LMDE. (so at the moment I am not opening any issues with those analyses risking that it is perhaps partly AI slop)

This weekend, I don't have enough time, so perhaps I'll focus on improving the packaging, which I already have a lot of experience with, and it's also small enough to do quickly (including all the tests in Debian and Mint VMs).

[Fantu]

I had previously made some compatibility patches on Debian and ruled out the aptkit bugs for now.
Regarding the patch to use packagekit instead of aptkit, it was larger than expected because I didn't want to tie it to gnome-software (as I think two other alternatives to Mintlocale that I had looked at do).

Afterwards, I ran some tests on Mint 22 and Debian unstable, and unfortunately, the tests confirmed what Claude had found, and other things too :(

Today, with Claude's help, I prepared and tested some patches, again on Mint 22 and Debian unstable.
I also did a quick search to see if the change from Ubuntu-specific parts to more standard ones, besides working on Debian, would also work on other distros, but I haven't tested them on other distros.

I used claude to generate a summary with the list of problems, patches made to solve them, so you can tell me what you think and if I should do 1 or more PR and try them again, plus one thing I preferred not to do and ask you at the moment:

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Branch packagekit-backend of the Fantu/mintlocale fork. Every problem below was reproduced in virtual machines on Debian unstable and, where it applies, on Linux Mint 22.3; the im-config one was checked on Ubuntu 26.04 too.

Problems found

1. A locale added from the GUI does not survive the next locale-gen, and a removed one comes back at it — fixed in f495053
2. The entries written to supported.d lose their charmap whenever the archive lists a locale without a codeset, and locale-gen then rejects them with error: Bad entry 'en_AG ' at every run — issue locales - error: Bad entry 'kab_DZ ' #90, Mint included — same commit
3. Removing a language leaves every translation, dictionary and hyphenation package the install step had put in, and on Debian removes nothing at all, since language-pack-* does not exist there — fixed in 86bb5fc
4. Counting the locales left for a language matched other languages whose code ends the same way, pan_IN for an_ES among them — same commit
5. ~/.xsessionrc is written without export, so the region and the time format never reach the session on Debian, where ~/.pam_environment is no longer read — fixed in 563840e
6. The Input Method window is unusable with im-config 1.0 and later: the old options are accepted and ignored, so the framework combo comes up empty and every Install button stays dead — fixed in 1ed1229
7. The system locale is written behind systemd-localed's back, so the locales it points at are never generated — fixed in 3ed2b95
8. Not fixed, see the question below: the System locale and Install / Remove Languages rows are hidden unless the user is in adm, sudo, wheel or root
9. Not this package: aptkit's SimpleAPTClient.purge_packages() raises NameError, it passes versioned_packages, which is never defined in that scope

Question

The System locale and Install / Remove Languages rows are only shown when the user belongs to adm, sudo, wheel or root. On a Debian install where a root password is set the first user is in none of them, so both rows are simply missing: there is no way to add a language or to apply the system locale, and nothing on screen says why. On Ubuntu and Mint the first user is always in sudo, which is why this never shows up there.

Would you want this changed? One way would be to always show the rows and let PolicyKit ask for the credentials when they are used, which is what gnome-control-center does, but if you would rather see it solved differently, tell me how and I will write the patch that way.