Package: dpkg Version: 1.14.26 Severity: wishlist Today many packages ship with translations (translated manual pages, .po files, translated documentation, translated tutorials, examples, whatever ...). Usually there are dozens of languages, of those only 1 or 2 I understand, so the rest is useless for me. Often tre translations "waste" several hundered MB on disk.
When trying to put debian on some limited-diskspace device (notebook with 8GB SSD), then every saved byte counts. While there is some tool to help with this (localepurge), it only cleans up manual pages and translation in /usr/share/locale. I suggest that some feature to configure only locales I want could be added to dpkg system. It could work like this: User will uncomment "do not install locales I do not want" option somewhere in dpkg config and he'll specify locales that he wants (for example: "cs, en") Packages then could contain information about files in them belonging to certain locale - that file could look similarly to md5sums file in the control.tar.gz in the .deb: example: cs /usr/share/doc/package-name/help-cs.pdf cs /usr/share/locale/package-name/cs/ cs /usr/share/locale/package-name/cs/package-name.mo de /usr/share/locale/package-name/de/ de /usr/share/locale/package-name/de/package-name.mo dpkg will consult this file in .deb (if present) with global settings, not installing those files that belong to locale that is unwanted (possibly not even storing metadata, like md5sums, etc ... so even dpkg -L won't list them). the "control" in control.tar.gz should them probably contain some field "Localisations:" (for example "Localisations: cd de en fi pl"), so if user changes later his mind and changes requested translations set, then only affected packages could get processed (extra translations either removed or installed as needed) Package maintainers would need to start adding this information, though ... but I don't think this will cause muchy extra work for them. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]
