On Sun, Mar 22, 2026 at 4:18 AM Rene Engelhard <[email protected]> wrote: > > This is bad for Phosh because it would pull in > > both libreoffice-common and libreoffice-core which total more than 200 > > MB without considering other dependencies. Is it possible to remove > > libreoffice-common and libreoffice-core from the Depends and > > Recommends of the libreoffice-l10n-* packages? > > And have libreoffice-l10n-* installed without libreoffice itself? How > much sense does that make? > > Won't do that. The only tning I would be willing to do is to make it a > Recommends:. As with apts default that will be installed too, though, > which is what we usually want, but which probably won't help for your > wish as it will be pulled in anyway?
It allows someone to install a Debian desktop with French and get a 4MB package (libreoffice-l10n-fr) installed without the 200 MB needed for libreoffice-common and libreoffice-core If they don't have libreoffice installed. When they install libreoffice, it will automatically support French immediately. What is the benefit of installing libreoffice-common and libreoffice-core? It doesn't include any of the LibreOffice apps. If you don't like my proposal, do you have any better way of solving Debian's language task metapackage issue? Currently, we have - task-french (French translations and utilities that don't require a GUI) - task-french-desktop (This currently is installed for people who install Debian in French, at least with the net installer, **and** keep "Debian desktop environment" selected. It installs dictionary and thesaurus support. It installs the LibreOffice and Firefox translations.) - task-french-kde-desktop (empty metapackage so it could probably be removed) - Some languages also have a task-LANGUAGE-gnome-desktop but French doesn't. One way to fix this is to add task-french-*-desktop metapackages for every desktop that Debian supports with an installer. task-french-mate-desktop, task-french-xfce-desktop, etc. There are 10 of those desktops and LibreOffice has more than 90 languages. This feels like an overwhelming number of binary packages. Thank you, Jeremy Bícha
