Thoughts about separating language packs

[Martin Pitt]

Hi!

Matt Zimmerman [2004-11-04  8:28 -0800]:
> On Wed, Nov 03, 2004 at 01:15:32PM +0100, Martin Pitt wrote:
> 
> > == Automatic extraction ==
> 
> Some things to worry about regarding extraction and repackaging:
> 
> - What happens if the package is built with a stock build environment which
>   does not perform the extraction?  The package's files will overlap with
>   the language pack.

Right, but I think this problem does not depend on a particular way of
extracting the stuff. If we want to have Ubuntu specific language
packs (which was a feature goal), then we just need to require an
Ubuntu specific build system as well.

> - How can we ensure that the language packs are up to date at release time?

I suppose the only way to ensure this is to finally build the language
packs after all other packages of a release have been built. And of
course we have to rebuild the whole distribution from scratch.

>   We wouldn't want a security update to cause some language support to
>   disappear, for a package which hadn't yet been built with the modified
>   build environment

Most security updates certainly won't touch translations, but if they
do, then we really have a problem. Either we force the people to
install a very big language pack along the security update, or we live
with the fact that they just break the translations of the touched
item. In the interest of not having to support many updates of the
language packas, the translation breakage is probably the way to go.

I don't really worry about the build environment. Since we do
source-only uploads, all debs are created on our buildds. If people
want to build them on their own boxes and insist to use a non-Ubuntu
build environment for building Ubuntu packages, they shall not blame
us for getting broken packages.

After all, I'm not sure whether language packs really solve more
problems than they cause. It is a giant effort and they would be great
for getting the distribution installation right, but there is
certainly a reason why so few distributions actually do it (I don't
know any, FWIW).

For my sake we can confine ourselves to fix the installation of OO.o
and Mozilla (and derivatives) languages. :-)

Have a nice day and TIA for any comments,

Martin

-- 
Martin Pitt                       http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer            http://www.ubuntulinux.org
Debian GNU/Linux Developer       http://www.debian.org
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