According to 'man apt.conf', Acquire::Languages can be set to declare which translations one wants downloading. The pseudo-language "environment" (which is part of the default setting) specifies that apt should check $LC_MESSAGES. However, if this doesn't include a "de" language, then it might actually be that Acquire::Languages was set at install time.
Thank you for pointing me to the apt.conf man page. Even after reading through the Languages section I cannot make sense of apt-get's behavior.
Check /etc/apt/apt-conf.d/* for Acquire::Languages.
Acquire::Languages is not set in any file in /etc/apt/apt-conf.d. I added the following line to /etc/apt/apt-conf.d/70debconf and re-ran apt-get update:
Acquire::Languages { "en" };
But apt-get still is querying German translations. Passing -o
"Acquire::Languages=en" to apt-get update does not change the behavior
either.
locale output: LANG=en_US.utf8 LANGUAGE=en_US.utf8 LC_CTYPE="en_US.utf8" LC_NUMERIC="en_US.utf8" LC_TIME="en_US.utf8" LC_COLLATE="en_US.utf8" LC_MONETARY="en_US.utf8" LC_MESSAGES="en_US.utf8" LC_PAPER="en_US.utf8" LC_NAME="en_US.utf8" LC_ADDRESS="en_US.utf8" LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.utf8" LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.utf8" LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.utf8" LC_ALL=en_US.utf8Finally I noticed that /var/lib/apt/lists contained a few files with names ending with "Translation-de". After removing this folder apt-get update does not query any translations any longer and also does not re-create any "-de" files in /var/lib/apt/lists. Looks like apt-get is trying to update all lists it ever had cached before.
Cheers, Dirk