Hi. I'd love some input here on the packaging of very large i18n components of software. The specific case at hand is koffice, which still doesn't ship with i18n files. I'd love to get this sorted out. The problem is that there is a *lot* of i18n material provided with koffice. There are translations for 37 different languages, coming to a total 21.7Mb. The question is how to actually package it. All of the available options have clear drawbacks. The options as I see it are as follows. 1) Build a single koffice-i18n binary package. This is bad because each non-US user will be required to download all 21Mb of translations for 37 languages just to get their own language, quite a big ask for users with slower/limited net connections. 2) Build 37 different koffice-i18n-lang binary packages (like kde-i18n). This is bad because we add another 37 binary packages to the archives. This is also not a solution that generalises since if we did this for every package in the archive that provides i18n files our package list would get completely out of hand. 3) Include koffice i18n files in the individual kde-i18n-lang packages. This is bad because koffice and kde are on different release cycles. It's also bad because it means I have to ask Noel (the kde-i18n maintainer) to do this job. 4) Don't ship koffice i18n files at all. I don't need to explain why this is bad. It's also the current situation, which I'd like to rectify. And so I honestly don't see a good solution to this. Can I please have some opinions on which of these solutions is least bad? Ben. :)
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