Re: RPM roadmapping

[Matthias Clasen <mclasen redhat com>]

On Tue, 2007-08-07 at 14:49 +0300, Panu Matilainen wrote:
> On Sun, 5 Aug 2007, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> 
> > One more thing that would be nice to take into consideration for rpm is
> > support for language packs or some way to install a limited set of
> > locales. We have traditionally kept our head in the sand, and said
> > rpm does not support this, disks are getting bigger anyway. But for
> > making useful live cds, something like this is pretty much indispensable
> > (considering that OOo with all locales is already bigger than one cd).
> >
> > The existing %lang tag support might be almost good enough.
> 
> Actually rpm does already support installing only a limited set of locales 
> via %{_install_langs} macro setting, and I think anaconda even set that to 
> match the selected languages at some point. It's just not that useful 
> since there's no way (apart from reinstalling with --force) to get back 
> any of the skipped languages.

Thats what I meant with the existing support. What it is missing is that
rpm needs to track the installed and skipped locales per-package, and 
some smart way to reinstall the relevant subset of packages when a new
locale is added to the system.

> Creating sub-packages for different locales doesn't suffer from that 
> problem but causes package (metadata) bloat...

Yeah, that is going to make the package database explode. Out of
interest, does the rpm database contain the %lang(<locale>) information
from the file lists, currently ?