RPM roadmapping

[Panu Matilainen]

On Tue, 7 Aug 2007, Matthias Clasen wrote:
>
> 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.

Yup.

>> 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 ?

Sure - how else could it support the above to the extent it currently 
does? :)

Something like this can be used to extract the info:
rpm -q --qf '[%{FILENAMES}\t%{FILELANGS}\n]' <package>

 	- Panu -