[This (harsh) reply is CCed to debian-devel, as I think it's the place to discuss about the issue.]
On Sun, Jun 14, 1998 at 11:10:13PM +0200, Peter Maydell wrote: > Package: man-db > Version: 2.3.10-65 > > man-db installs Spanish, Italian and German versions of its manpages, > as well as English ones. This is one of the goals of Debian. It is surely the main reason for *my* partacipation to the project. When I find a package wich doesn't install all the translations available in its sources, I raise a bug asking to do so. > It ought to ask the sysadmin which languages > to install rather than installing them all without prompting. If every package would prompt for this, installation would become a nightmare. If I do this, I'm sure someone else would raise a bug against unnecessary prompting, and I would agree with him. Therefore I will not do this. > [Actually, this ought to be a system-wide setting...] You're right here. So the problem is not in man-db (or any other package installing all the available languages), but in the insatallation tools. I think this is a long awaited enhancement in dpkg's todo list. Last year Ian was too busy for this, now we've been promised that apt (it was deity before) will do that, and I hope he will do this ASAP. But I think it would be important to have a way to change your mind later, to let you add another language. > This might not seem like a significant disk usage for this package > (it's about 25K extra for each language), but consider if every > program installed four versions. Then the necessity to have such decision tool will become urgent, and the tool will be done. If I drop translations, this will never be done. > My /usr/man/man?/ tree is about 5MB, > and I would certainly object if Debian installed an unnecessary extra > 15MB of man pages I would never read. Your opinion that translations are "unnecessary extras" is only your opinion. My aim is to create a multilingual distribution. My preferred example for this is a shell machine in a ISP in Europe, in Bozen or Brussels, or even here in Turku, places where people speaks more than one language, and you cannot know in advance which language will be used by every user. If you don't reassign this bug to dpkg or apt, I will close it in two days (as later I will be busy). fab -- | [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] | 6F7267F5 fingerprint 57 16 C4 ED C9 86 40 7B 1A 69 A1 66 EC FB D2 5E > PROSA srl - la prima azienda commerciale esclusivamente open-source | support the open-source initiative! http://www.opensource.org/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
