splitting manpages-nl (and perhaps other manpages translations)
Hi,
I maintain the debian package of Jos Boersema's manpages-nl,
dutch translation of linux manpages. It contains quite some
manpages: ls(1), tar(1), exit(2), syslog(2), sources.list(5),
ping(8), to name a few. Currenlty I'm considering to split this
package in things like
manpages-nl-fileutils
manpages-nl-tar
manpages-nl-dev
manpages-nl-apt
manpages-nl-netkit-ping
One thing we'd gain by this is a better versioning: a subpackage
could follow the source, and be updated once the source (e.g.
fileutils) is updated. Furthermore, once this split is done, one
could so nifty things with Suggests and Provides flags. E.g.
something like:
fileutils suggests manpages-fileutils-translation
manpages-nl-fileutils provides manpages-fileutils-translation
manpages-de-fileutils provides manpages-fileutils-translation
manpages-fileutils-translation would be a virtual package.
I believe such a scheme makes it easier to configure a Debian
box as e.g. a "Dutch Debian box".
Of course, there will be even more packages in Debian
than we allready have; people with old machines using the package
tools won't like this. But I don't think this is something we
should "solve" by keeping things together which don't belong
together in one package. This should be solved by something
like making the package tools more scalable.
And of course, this whole story is equally true for manpages-de,
manpages-es, manpages-fr, manpages-hu, manpages-it etc. (Some of
these are split in manpages-foo and manpages-foo-dev.) Imho, it
would even be usefull to not only split the debian package, but
also the upstream source tarball.
Any comments? Is this just overkill? Is it usefull?
Bye,
Joost
PS: Mail-Followup-To set to debian-i18n, while waiting for
debian-xl8n to start.
--
Joost van Baal .
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