Re: Should l10n packages be Recommends or Suggests?

["Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>]

On Thu, Dec 05, 2024 at 01:02:29PM -0800, Josh Triplett wrote:
> Personally, I am quite sympathetic to the argument about wasting disk
> space, and I care about the size of the base system myself. But I think
> the primary affordance we make for such use cases is for core system
> packages to have separate -l10n packages *at all* (whereas many packages
> just ship localization directly in the main package).

Many, but not all.  For example, bash and coreutils ship
/usr/share/locale files in the base package.

I recently added a "rm -rf /usr/share/locale" to the build
kvm-xfstests test appliance, and it saved 16 megabytes in the
compressed qemu-img test appliance.  (And this was *without* my
installing any *-l10n packages, including not installing
e2fsprogs-l10n.)

> > I agree that we should take a more opinioned stance in Debian Policy.
> 
> https://bugs.debian.org/1089110

I've looked at this bug, but unlessed I missed something, this seems
to be "rm -rf /usr/share/locale" shouldn't cause binaries to core
dump.  I'm guessing this is the reason for the "beware of the leopard"
vibe in the documentation of localepurge package?  I didn't realize
binaries would be so ill-behaved as to crash if the locale files were
missing.  Sigh...

Perhaps we should have a separate debian policy proposal which
explicitly makes a requirement that the locale files should be
separated for anything installed by default by debootstrap, and what
the dependency priority of the *-l10n package should be?

    	       		       	      - Ted