[Bug 2037584] Re: ubuntu-pro-client-l10n translations are stripped

[Robie Basak]

Speaking for myself as a member of the SRU team, and not the SRU team as
a whole:

It seems to me that since pkgbinarymangler is designed to do multiple
things, some of which we have no reason to disable, we should aim to
disable just the translation handling since that's exactly what we want
to do. And the package has a mechanism to do that so we should use it.
Even if a little unwieldy by requiring a pkgbinarymangler upload, using
this mechanism seems like it would be relatively risk-free in an SRU
because it is very specifically targetted. Even if it does potentially
impact every build, its behaviour should be able to be fairly easily
checked. We could verify that its behaviour hasn't changed against an
unrelated package during SRU verification easily and confidently enough.
Using NO_PKG_MANGLE sounds like it has other side effects that might
have more implications that need consideration and therefore more risk
of missing something.

For the development release, perhaps a finer-grained control in
pkgbinarymangler that can be operated from the build of a package itself
rather than changing pkgbinarymangler would be appropriate. But for an
SRU I think using striptranslations.blacklist seems like the minimally
impactful way to do it.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/2037584

Title:
  ubuntu-pro-client-l10n translations are stripped

Status in pkgbinarymangler package in Ubuntu:
  In Progress
Status in pkgbinarymangler source package in Xenial:
  New
Status in pkgbinarymangler source package in Bionic:
  New
Status in pkgbinarymangler source package in Focal:
  New
Status in pkgbinarymangler source package in Jammy:
  New
Status in pkgbinarymangler source package in Lunar:
  New

Bug description:
  [ Impact ]

  In the upcoming version of ubuntu-advantage-tools, we will ship
  translation files in a new separate binary package called ubuntu-pro-
  client-l10n.

  If you build ubuntu-pro-client-l10n with the current version of
  pkgbinarymangler, then translations are stripped and tarballed for
  inclusion in the langpack. We specifically don't want these
  translations included in the langpack for any release because pro-
  client gets updates (including strings) more frequently and many more
  times than langpacks get built.

  In order to ship those translation files in ubuntu-pro-client-l10n we
  need to stop pkgbinarymangler from stripping them at build time.
  pkgbinarymangler has striptranslations.blacklist specifically for this
  purpose, so the fix is to add ubuntu-pro-client-l10n to that list.

  [ Test Plan ]

  Since the ubuntu-pro-client-l10n package is only getting introduced in
  the next version of ubuntu-advantage-tools (v30), the fixing and
  testing of this bug needs to be closely coordinated with the release
  of u-a-t.

  Once u-a-t v30 is fully reviewed and ready to move to -proposed, we
  will first upload the fix of this bug to -proposed and wait for the
  binary proposed publication of pkgbinarymangler to complete. Then we
  will accept u-a-t v30 to -proposed.

  In order to test that this bug is fixed, we will check that the binary
  ubuntu-pro-client-l10n package built from u-a-t v30 in -proposed
  contains the appropriate translation files. We will also verify that
  translations are working in u-a-t when ubuntu-pro-client-l10n is
  installed.

  After showing all of that working together, we can mark this bug as verification-done
     
  [ Where problems could occur ]

  striptranslations.blacklist is a list of regexes, so if `ubuntu-pro-
  client-l10n` accidentally matches some other package, then that
  package would not have its translations stripped either.

  Generally, new packages in -updates on ESM releases such as xenial and
  bionic (perhaps aside from u-a-t) are surprising and unexpected to
  users.

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