Thoughts about separating language packs

[Fabio Massimo Di Nitto]

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Martin Pitt wrote:
| Hi folks!
|
| Today I had some time to think about separating language packs for
| Hoary. I wrote down some ideas below, in a wiki-suitable syntax.
|

| The last script in the hook directory can check if a regeneration of
| the language packs is necessary and trigger it if appropriate.

I think the trigger should be done only on a daily base and not more
often, otherwise we will endup in a endless update of these language
packages.


| == debconf translations ==
|
| This is probably the most tricky part. All translations are stored in
| a single ".templates" file. It is possible to automatically extract
| them, but it is difficult to dynamically add them again at package
| installation. If we want to do this, we need a dpkg pre-installation
| hook.
|
| The question is whether it is really worth to separate debconf
| translations in the first place. During normal installation the user
| does not see any questions anyway, and I doubt that debconf
| translations account for a significant increase of package size.

I don't think it is worth to do it and it is going to be pretty complex.

The language pack should be installed at d-i time, since most of the
templates are parsed at preconfiguration time (when the package is not
even unpacked, so the lang has to be there already) and it would slow
down the already not extremely fast process of extracting templates
(reason why we added a progress meter).

Also.. a similar process has to be performed each time there is an
upgrade. The lang pack should be always updated before the other
packages and then we can jump to preconfiguration stage. Otherwise you
might end up showing old translation to the user (possibly incorrect).

Fabio

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