Preparing tomorrow's language pack TB topic

[Martin Pitt]

Hi!

It gets high time to discuss the future of the language pack
structure. The spec [1] has not been approved so far, and the proposed
changes are quite drastic, so I feel better with discussing this
subject in a TB again (sorry to destroy the hope of another 7-minute
quickie meeting :-) ).

For the sake of explanation, let's categorize translations into three
fields: gnome, kde, other. For the langpacks, we then have the
following options:

(1) language-pack-xx = {gnome,other}
    kde-i18n-xx = {kde, documentation, etc.}
    (status quo)

    + only a single set of langpacks
    + our CDs can host many translations (all translations on 2 arches)
    - no Kubuntu/KDE support for Rosetta
    - KDE users get useless Gnome translations

(2) language-pack-xx = {kde,gnome,other}
    kde-i18n-xx = {only documentation}

    + uniform handling
    + only a single set of langpacks
    - KDE translations are huge, this would more than double the size
      of each langpacks, which would mean to not ship many of them any
      more
    - KDE users get useless Gnome translations and vice versa

(3) language-pack-xx = {other}
    language-pack-gnome-xx = {gnome}
    language-pack-kde-xx = {kde}
    kde-i18n-xx = {only documentation}
    (described in the spec [1])

    + very modular, appropriate choice can be tailored for a
      particular derivative
    + much less download overhead
    + we can maintain the set of shipped translations
    - increases number of packages by ~ 400:
      (gnome+kde) * (base + update) * 100 languages
    - upgrading from Hoary needs to be solved (l-p-gnome-xx has to be
      installed)

As you can see, there is no Golden Way. However, I'd appreciate if you
could already think a minute about the options so that we don't need
to waste too much time with explaining the alternatives tomorrow.

Thanks and have a nice day!

Martin

P.S. The current langpack-o-matic is prepared for all options, the
implementation is not an issue.

[1] http://udu.wiki.ubuntu.com/LanguagePackRoadmap

-- 
Martin Pitt        http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer   http://www.ubuntu.com
Debian Developer   http://www.debian.org
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