Re: [RFC] apt-localepurge - automagically removing unnecessary locale files

[Nicolás Lichtmaier <nick@debian.org>]

> > Now, if interested parties would like to have a scrutinizing look at it
> > and possibly encourage me to make an upload of this crude hack?  It
> > might not be rocket science but it solves a problem, doesn't it?
> Well, I wish the time spent writing this had been used to begin adding
> real support to dpkg for excluding operating on files at all based on a
> regex. That has no many more general uses: Not installing docs, man
> pages, info pages, or locales; shared /usr/ or /usr/share/ that is not
> modified by the client machines, and so on.

 I've seen this being proposed all the time, but... would be adviseable to
have such a feature? I mean, giving the end user the power to remove files
from packages by using regex?

 Wouldn't it be more logical to have some way to tag files, and dpkg would
remove files that contain (or lacks) a tag.

 E.g.:

Package: supergame

/var/lib/dpkg/info/supergame.tags:
-----------------------------------------------
/usr/lib/supergame/logo.fr.gif		locale-fr
/usr/lib/supergame/logo.es.gif		locale-es
/usr/share/locale/fr/supergame.mo	locale-fr
/usr/share/locale/es/supergame.mo	locale-es
/usr/share/doc/supergame/manual/.*	documentation

 I guess it's better let the maintainer decide which files in a package
provides a given functionality.