Re: Thoughts about tdebs
On Wed, 03 Dec 2008, Neil Williams wrote:
> On Wed, 3 Dec 2008 14:28:58 +0000
> Mark Brown <broonie@sirena.org.uk> wrote:
>
> > > >From what I understand of your idea, you seem to think about
> > > translations mainly as updates. While it is one of the goals to
> > > enable translation-only updates, it is not quite obvious to me what
> > > your proposal has to offer in terms of splitting translations out
> > > of the debs, which is an explicit goal. Also, the proposal
> > > specifically aims at limiting the amount of data that the archive
> > > and apt have to handle.
> >
> > Surely translations can be modeled as updates to translationless .deb
> > files (ie, you have a .deb with no translations and then patch that
> > package to add the translations)?
>
> Why patch the package? Why not simply put a TDeb alongside the
> "translationless" Debian package? The internal layout of the TDeb is
> important to the overall usefulness of TDebs in general.
Why? If you have rules to generate the internal layout, you can most
certainly adapt those rules to apply them at some other point of the
distribution mechanism.
Anyway, having translation outside of the original package also represent a cost:
- manually installing a software requires download of 2 packages with the
risk of badly mixing them
- in term of preparation for the packager, he has to say what's part of
the tdeb and what's not
- in term of administration for the repository manager
So while I agree that it would be good to resolve the problem of the
translators, I don't think that it should be done at all costs. In
particular when the Emdebian-specific size-problem gets less and less
real over the years (for my own semi-embedded projects, I have been forced
to buy larger and larger DOM over the years as the smaller capacity are
simply not produced any more).
Whatever experiment you might have done within Emdebian, I will not trust
any design decision that lacks a (serious) rationale and explanations
of why the alternatives are not viable.
(That said, it's only my opinion and I'm not the one that maintains the C
part of dpkg)
Cheers,
--
Raphaël Hertzog
Le best-seller français mis à jour pour Debian Etch :
http://www.ouaza.com/livre/admin-debian/
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