Re: Bug#23522: man-db installs foreign language manpages
Fabrizio Polacco wrote:
>On Sun, Jun 14, 1998 at 11:10:13PM +0200, Peter Maydell wrote:
>> 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.
My point wasn't that installing man pages for multiple languages was
wrong, just that installing them without asking was wrong.
>> 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.
You're probably right here. My intention in filing this bug report
was more to bring up this point as a general problem. It's not a bug
against man-db in the sense of 'this must be fixed immediately'.
[but on the other hand I'm not sure severity: wishlist is right either]
>> 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.
They're unnecessary extras *on my machine*. If I don't want a web
server on my machine, I don't install that package. If I don't want
the Linux HOWTOs, I don't install doc-linux-text. If I don't want
Spanish documentation, I should be able to not install it.
Presumably this is (will be) a problem for (eg) German users too -- why
should they have Spanish man pages *unless they ask for them*?
>My preferred
>example for this is a shell machine in a ISP in Europe
Obviously some admins will want all language versions. But they are
in the minority and Debian ought to cater for the rest of us too.
>If you don't reassign this bug to dpkg or apt, I will close it in two
>days (as later I will be busy).
<rant>
Oi! I'm an end user (OK, so I browse debian-devel :->). I'm not supposed
to have to know how to manipulate the bug tracking system. I agree that
man-db might not be the right place for this bug report, but I wasn't
sure where to file bugs against programs that don't exist (our hypothetical
language management tool) so I picked the only package on my system with
multiple-language manpages. If you don't think it's filed against the
right package, it's *your* responsibility as a developer to reassign
it to the right place.
</rant>
[In fact, I probably could reassign it, if I read the BTS documentation;
but as a point of principle you shouldn't ask me to :->]
Peter Maydell
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