On a typical Gnome installation, /usr/share/locale/ can take up 250Mb or more (those who attended the Emdebian talk at DebConf7 will have heard how Emdebian currently handles this problem). [6] [7] [8]
This is one of the changes sought by Emdebian to support using Debian on embedded devices where storage space is far from cheap and involves running counter to the current Debian default of "install everything that works, every time, every package". http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2007/11/msg00116.html A similar issue affects the glibc gconv support and the tzdata zoneinfo support - both packages include files that need to be removed on devices that have no translation/locale/tzdata requirements and both need to have some form of set selection support for devices that can only support one or (at most) less than 6 actual translation/locale configurations. e.g. where en_GB, GMT, BST, ISO8859-1 and UTF-8 would form a collective "set" of packages that provide the necessary support. Extending that to include 'fr' could then simply be a case of installing suitable translation packages that provide those .mo files without providing any others. The interim method used in Emdebian currently is unsustainable because it increases the number of binary packages tenfold which has unacceptable consequences for the dpkg and apt cache size if the translation packages are included into the main repository. It is, however, manageable for the small subset of packages currently in use by Emdebian. This thread will seek a sustainable method that separates the translation files and all gconv and zoneinfo support into a dedicated structure, outside the normal $mirror/debian main archive layout, such that Debian can support installing all translations (as now), no translations (for Emdebian on a router etc.) and any permutation of translations, appropriate gconv support and any mix of zoneinfo support that would be appropriate for an embedded device like a PDA or smartphone etc. Such a system would also be ideal for allowing translators to upload translation updates without needing a package upload by the maintainer. In due course, I would wish to see the presence of /usr/share/locale/ in a package in Debian main as an RC violation of Policy. It would also be good to discourage non-gettext methods of translation to enable support within the new system. I am therefore seeking a second layer of repository structure that removes all /usr/share/locale/ data from all packages in Debian, creates language-specific packages for each individual .mo file from each individual package and allies those to individual packages for the gconv files from glibc and the zoneinfo files from tzdata into a system that can provide two implementations: a) Current Debian of install everything anyway b) Necessary Emdebian route of installing ONLY the translations that match the locale with appropriate gconv support and zoneinfo support with a debconf frontend to add extra locales and necessary support so that any user can specify that only en_GB, fr and sv should be supported etc. This second layer would need separate dpkg and apt cache data. Ideally, the cache data would also be subdivided so that an embedded device supporting translations would not need to even have cache data for locales that were not listed in a form of apt sources list. It may be possible, for example, to support a repository component for each locale name and that component would contain all necessary packages (or links to them). [6] http://linux.codehelp.co.uk/emdebian/debconf7/htdocs/img9.html [7] http://linux.codehelp.co.uk/emdebian/debconf7/htdocs/img13.html [8] http://linux.codehelp.co.uk/emdebian/html/ch04.html -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.data-freedom.org/ http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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