Wouldn't that require that the user downloads the whole package with perhaps dozens of languages? I think that would be a lot of superfluous downloading especially with a slowish connection. Could we develope some system that allows the package to be split into logical pieces (eg. languages) and the user could download the relevant files only? I know the translation databases are often quite small but particularly the package 'locales' is a way too big to download too often.My idea is to have an environment variable (say DPKG_LINGUAS) with the list of the languages that the user wants to install For example for choosing english , spanish and italian you would use export DPKG_LINGUAS="en es it" Then when you ask dpkg to install one package , and it finds a .mo file to to be installed in /usr/share/locale/X/LC_MESSAGES , it would check if the language X is in the DPKG_LINGUAS variable. If found, the file is installed and otherwise ignored (if DPKG_LINGUAS is not set, all the languages would be installed)
Should the package system record the status of installed subpackages?