Re: Bug#641967: Apt downloads all description translations
On Mon, Aug 27, 2012 at 7:43 PM, Samuel Thibault <sthibault@debian.org> wrote:
> Control: tags 641967 + important
Is closed for a long time now and unrelated in so far as nobody
is setting this variable - otherwise the auto-detection would not
play safe here. I am dropping the cc to it therefore.
(And the other thing mentioned in it: That the download of 10 files is
slower than the download of 5 files is not a bug, but common sense.)
> Control: tags 678227 + important
(Happily went under my radar as his reporter manages every time
he got out of my kill-file to rejoin it in a few days, if not hours as
I am probably on his as he continues his tirade against InRelease
or now Translation-* without giving a damn what I or even others say)
If you could add a message to this bug telling a casual reader what
you think is a (or the) bug here, please do so. I don't see one.
I only see one which quotes the documentation explaining exactly
why this behavior is present and yet vouches to break it without a
reason beside that an update is now slower than before.
(With the hidden message that data is download which isn't needed by
him, but failing to understand that APT has no way of knowing what
all users on the system might need and therefore does the most sensible
thing: keeping all data up-to-date it currently uses)
> The issue also happens at debian-installer time, thus downloading way
(I don't know why an "also" is in that sentence …)
apt-cdrom copies every Translation-* file from the disk to /var/lib/apt/lists
and libapt applications nowadays will proceed with updating them all
rather than dropping all not in the current environment (which nowadays
is usually LANG=C as run by cron or an APT front-end).
This is NOT new. Translation files exist for a long time and apt-cdrom
copies them for a long time. The difference is that we now have
a) a Translation-en file containing the English long descriptions
b) libapt supporting users who can understand more than one language
c) libapt supporting systems with more than one admin
So these files were already copied to /var/lib/apt/lists, it's just that
apt-get and everything else using libapt will not drop Translation-* files
in there on the first run as there is a good chance that this run will be
done by cron or a front-end in LANG=C loosing all this valuable data.
> more than necessary, and taking a lot of disk space (seen 82M here) for
> no reason, thus moving the "embedded" barrier yet higher for Debian.
No reason indeed if your only target audience is a crowd of people who
perfectly speak English (en_US) and can choose packages just by looking
at a short description. If you want to support more people - and the effort
many people put into creating these Translations files suggests that at least
some want to support them - we need to ship these files to them.
Not to mention the poor souls who like to read English long descriptions …
Embedded systems aren't in any way less supported than before by this.
The very same config option used since ever to disable the download of
Translation files is still supported. In a way, it is even better supported
as you have the option of getting right of -en, too, saving even more MB.
Best regards
David Kalnischkies
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