On Montag, 9. Juni 2003 03:46, Ben Burton wrote: > Hi. I'd love some input here on the packaging of very large i18n > components of software. The specific case at hand is koffice, which > still doesn't ship with i18n files. I'd love to get this sorted out. > > The problem is that there is a *lot* of i18n material provided with > koffice. There are translations for 37 different languages, coming to a > total 21.7Mb. > > The question is how to actually package it. All of the available > options have clear drawbacks. The options as I see it are as follows. > > 1) Build a single koffice-i18n binary package. > > This is bad because each non-US user will be required to download all > 21Mb of translations for 37 languages just to get their own language, > quite a big ask for users with slower/limited net connections. > > 2) Build 37 different koffice-i18n-lang binary packages (like kde-i18n). > > This is bad because we add another 37 binary packages to the archives. > This is also not a solution that generalises since if we did this > for every package in the archive that provides i18n files our package > list would get completely out of hand. > > 3) Include koffice i18n files in the individual kde-i18n-lang packages. > > This is bad because koffice and kde are on different release cycles. > It's also bad because it means I have to ask Noel (the kde-i18n maintainer) > to do this job. > > 4) Don't ship koffice i18n files at all. > > I don't need to explain why this is bad. It's also the current > situation, which I'd like to rectify. > > And so I honestly don't see a good solution to this. Can I please have > some opinions on which of these solutions is least bad? 2). I've build the koffice-i18n packages in the same way that the kde-i18n packages are. That avoids 37 source packages at least but only gives you the languages. Also it scales much better because you just have to take the kde-i18n package's debian dir and change it accordingly to spit out koffice-i18n-* packages. That's the way things are handled since koffice 1.2 and if we continue this way we won't break upgrading for those who have koffice installed on woody. Ralf > > Ben. :) -- We're not a company, we just produce better code at less costs. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Ralf Nolden nolden@kde.org The K Desktop Environment The KDevelop Project http://www.kde.org http://www.kdevelop.org
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