[RFC] Moving localedef/locale-gen into a seperate package
Hi all,
since binaries are moved into a new package, I take this opportunity to
discuss a point I have in mind for a long time.
The locales package contains locale data files and is Arch: all. In its
postinst, it calls locale-gen (shipped in locales too, it is a shell
script) which in turn calls localedef (shipped in libc6).
With belocs, binaries are put into belocs-locales-bin and data files
into belocs-locales-data, which is much more logical.
I would like to move these 2 programs into a new package. I have some
programs to help writing locales, they could go into this package too.
We have also been requested to ship a locales-all package, containing
all supported locales.
So we have 3 packages, called BIN (with locale-gen/localedef), DATA
(with locale data files) and ALL. Let's now see how to choose package
names to not break existing packages.
27 packages Build-depends on locales. If we do not want to break them,
we must set BIN = locales, and BIN depends on DATA.
70 packages Depends on locales, but it is unclear whether they depend
on data files or generated locales. Most of them surely depends on the
latter, in which case they could also work with the ALL package. But
ALL cannot Provides: locales because they are not functionally
equivalent: locales would contain everything to compile locales, whereas
ALL contains precompiled locales. A better alternative would be to
introduce a dummy package name, say working-locales, which will be
provided by ALL and BIN.
To summarize, I suggest to
* Move data files into a new locales-data package
* Move locale-gen and localedef into the locales package
* Keep debconf stuff into locales
* Let locales Depends: locales-data and Provides: working-locales
* Move locales from Arch: all to Arch: any
* Create a locales-all package, which Provides: working-locales
Comments?
I would like to make these changes in 2.3.6-6 to go through NEW queue
only once.
Denis
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