Separating Mozilla/OO.o language packs [was: Re: Thoughts about separating language packs]

[Chris Halls]

On Thu, 2004-11-11 at 21:20 +0100, Martin Pitt wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> Martin Pitt [2004-11-03 13:15 +0100]:
> > == non-gettext translations ==
> > 
> > Since this must be handled on a by-case basis, it might be impossible
> > to catch each and every tiny bit. However, the two major cases are
> > currently mozilla-firefox and openoffice.org. Both packages currently
> > provide separate debs for languages, so the contents and maintainer
> > scripts should just be merged into the appropriate language packs.
> 
> Since the gettext extraction has major drawbacks and should better be
> discussed in the Tech Board Meeting, I decided to tackle with this
> first, since AFAICS our main problem is the absence of localized
> Mozilla/FireFox/OO.o translation by now.
> 
> Currently both the mozilla and the OO.o language debs depend on the
> respective main package, i. e. mozilla-firefox-locale-de depends on
> mozilla-firefox. However, it is relatively easy to modify Mozilla,
> FireFox and OO.o so that language packs can be installed independently
> of the main package. 
> 
> This has the advantage that we do not need to bother with extracting
> the contents of various l10n debs and merge them into a "language
> pack". Instead it would be enough to have e. g. ubuntu-language-de
> depend on mozilla-firefox-locale-de, openoffice.org-l10n-de,
> myspell-de-de and so on.
> 
> Unless there are objections to this approach, I would start to modify
> the existing l10n debs to be installable independently and create
> ubuntu-language-* metapackages afterwards. If we decide to really
> extract gettext stuff, we can always enrich these language packs with
> it later.

This sounds like a reasonable idea to me.  We have exactly the same
problem concerning OOo and tasksel for Debian proper.  I wonder if we
could come up with a package name that could be provided by both tasksel
and the ubuntu language packs, maybe language-*?  I'd be happy to add
such a Depends into the language packs for OOo.

Chris