Re: Bug#23522: man-db installs foreign language manpages
[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
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