Bug#448018: tzdata: please consider splitting the package by timezone for embedded users
Package: tzdata
Version: 2007h-2
Severity: wishlist
It would be very useful for Emdebian if tzdata could be split into
separate packages for each $TIMEZONE value in debian/rules. Users could
then install just the packages needed for their embedded device without
wasting precious flash space.
It could be possible to use the existing template generation code to
generate extra packages to be appended to debian/control prior to the
build and creating tzdata-$TIMEZONE.install files with the necessary
variables included:
tzgen/$TIMEZONE/* usr/share/zoneinfo/$TIMEZONE/
tzgen/posix/$TIMEZONE/* usr/share/zoneinfo/posix/$TIMEZONE/
etc.
This would split tzdata into 14 packages (possibly with a tzdata-base
package making 15) and make tzdata about 10x smaller for most users.
Whilst hard disc space is cheap for Debian, flash space is incredibly
expensive for embedded users and the current tzdata package simply
cannot be used on some devices that could use Emdebian.
I have experimented with this approach with manual changes to tzdata but
without some form of automation, the changes would get out of sync.
-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
APT prefers unstable
APT policy: (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.22-2-amd64 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Versions of packages tzdata depends on:
ii debconf [debconf-2.0] 1.5.15 Debian configuration management sy
tzdata recommends no packages.
-- debconf information excluded
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