Advice needed - moving GNOME help files into langpacks

[Martin Pitt]

Shaun McCance [2009-08-30 10:34 -0500]:
> OK.  I'm not a packaging expert, so I'll just have to trust
> you on this one.  But I don't see how splitting a package
> into subpackages is any different than what gets done now
> with -dev packages.

If a file moves from e. g. libfoo1 to libfoo-dev, then you have the
very same file conflict situation. In that case you have to declare a
Conflicts:/Replaces: field to tell the package manager that libfoo-dev
has a file which was previously shipped in libfoo1.

But using that approach for langpacks would mean that language-pack-*
had to grow a Replaces: field to _all_ packages it has files for, i.
e. to perhaps 50 or 100 GNOME packages. This might have a serious
impact on the package manager.

> So, with your proposed solution, in Yelp 3 you would need
> to patch Yelp to also look for help files there.  If you
> were to use a directory structure like
> 
>   /usr/share/langpack/gnome/help/empathy/de/
> 
> Then you'd just need to ensure that /usr/share/langpack
> is in XDG_DATA_DIRS (or modify Yelp to auto-insert it,
> which would be a much smaller patch).

That sounds great, and indeed much more elegant and robust than the
symlink-mania. Good to know that it will only be an intermediate
crutch.

Thanks,

Martin

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