Thoughts about separating language packs

[Scott James Remnant]

On Wed, 2004-11-03 at 13:15 +0100, Martin Pitt wrote:

> The goal is to separate all translation and localization parts from
> all packages to "language packs". Per supported language we want to
> have one package which contains l10n stuff for all Ubuntu supported
> packages.
> 
What happens when the user builds a package from source themselves?
Should the translations in their source package be thrown away in favour
of the language pack, if not how do we resolve the "Replaces:
language-pack" issue?

> We currently have 1047 source packages, but as much as 265 do not use
> debhelper. Although a debhelper hook would be easier, it would miss
> about a quarter of our source packages, which is not acceptable.
> 
Where do you get that quarter figure from?  By my quick
finger-in-the-air guess, nearly all of the packages in main use
debhelper.

> Therefore, dpkg-deb must be modified, preferably in a general way so
> that it could go to Debian, too. dpkg-dev should introduce a directory
> 
>   /etc/dpkg/dpkg-deb-hook.d/
> 
I utterly disagree.  I've rejected features like this for dpkg before,
and will continue to do so.  I don't believe package managers should be
arbitrarily extendable like this, instead I believe they should be
completely predictable.

If you want certain files to not be placed in the package, you take them
out (or don't put them in) in debian/rules.  Either add a call to
something that extracts the translations, or modify debhelper and
friends to do the extraction for you.

Scott
-- 
Have you ever, ever felt like this?
Had strange things happen?  Are you going round the twist?
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/attachments/20041105/84b91285/attachment.pgp