Re: Debian packages and freedesktop.org (Gnome, KDE, etc) menu entries

[Henning Makholm <henning@makholm.net>]

Scripsit Isaac Clerencia <isaac@sindominio.net>

> I sincerely hope that some day further development of Debian's great
> package management system will make localepurge fully obsolete.

<brainstorm on>

I've been wondering whether the Right solution to this kind of
problems might be to invent some concept of "glue packages". In
technical terms, that would be a way to tell apt-get and its ilk
things like:

- If frobnitz and locale-danish are both installed, then automatically
  try to install frobnitz-i18n-da.

- If frobnitz and emacsen are both installed, then automatically try
  to install frobnitz-el.

- If libx11 and tetex-base are both installed, then automatically try
  to install xdvi.

- If ispell and locale-danish are both installed, then automatically
  try to install idanish.

Then by installing appropriate locale-XXX packages, one would
automatically pull in i18ns for the specified language for all
packages that have been translated. Nobody would get bloated with
translations of pacakges they don't use or translatations to languages
they don't read.

Most of the glue packages should be in a special section where they
don't show up in package-selection interfaces. Possible exceptions
would be things like idanish above - it's quite plausible to want
Danish spell checking without also wanting one's tools in general to
attempt to speak Danish in status and error messages.

Since many glue packages will individually be quite small, some
implementation engineering will be necessary in order to prevent bloat
my maintainer scripts and standard /usr/share/doc/* contents. Some
kind of by-demand distribution and assembly of Packages files might
also be necessary in practise.

</brainstorm>

-- 
Henning Makholm                        "Nej, hvor er vi altså heldige! Længe
                                      leve vor Buxgører Sansibar Bastelvel!"