Re: Thoughts about tdebs
Hello,
Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> I just read the specs drafted at the meeting this WE and I'm not really
> excited about the prospective implementation of TDebs.
Thanks for your appreciation and taking the time to comment.
> IMO we're heading in the wrong direction by focussing only on translation
> and by special casing everything to meet this expected usage.
It is a very sizable special case, though, and growing thanks to the
tireless translation efforts within and beyond Debian. This is why the
consensus at the meeting seemed to be to get this right even if it means
having to implement some special casing.
> I guess you understand better the idea by now. This needs more thoughts
> but I wanted to share it so that you can think about it too.
>From what I understand of your idea, you seem to think about
translations mainly as updates. While it is one of the goals to enable
translation-only updates, it is not quite obvious to me what your
proposal has to offer in terms of splitting translations out of the
debs, which is an explicit goal. Also, the proposal specifically aims at
limiting the amount of data that the archive and apt have to handle.
I'm not quite sure how useful the notes about design considerations are,
but you could always ask Neil whether they are in a shape to publish
them for further discussion. It seems that at Casar de Cáceres we found
quite a few corner-cases that had not been previously considered.
With some distance, it might well be that we could generalize (at least
parts of) the tdeb-implementation to class support (with different
members of the ar archive per class[1]). We would still want to separate
them out, but that might be a good way to arrive at a better mechanism.
In summary, yes, there might be room for generalization, but taking your
suggestions as an indication, maybe part of your dissatisfaction with
the direction that the tdeb proposal takes stems from a disparity in the
goals that each is concerned with.
Kind regards
T.
P.S.: While looking at dpkg-deb: Would it be reasonable to drop
old-style deb support by now?
1. Given appropriate protocol support, this would allow retrieving only
certain translations.
--
Thomas Viehmann, http://thomas.viehmann.net/
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