Un-asked-for-language support

[Antonio Olivares]

--- On Sun, 11/29/09, Michal Jaegermann <michal at harddata.com> wrote:

> From: Michal Jaegermann <michal at harddata.com>
> Subject: Re: Un-asked-for-language support
> To: "For testers of Fedora Core development releases" <fedora-test-list at redhat.com>
> Date: Sunday, November 29, 2009, 5:59 PM
> On Sun, Nov 29, 2009 at 08:06:47PM
> -0500, Richard Ryniker wrote:
> > 
> > In either case (packages contain data for many
> locales; packages do not
> > contain locale data, but have a shared dependency on
> other packages to
> > provide data for each individual locale), it is
> possible to consider a
> > pruning utility that would delete unnecessary data
> 
> A "pruning utility" does exits.  If you have various
> language
> packages, like "openoffice.org-langpack..." or
> "kde-l10n-..." then
> it is called "Customize now" during an installation and
> later on
> "yum remove ...".  You can also use 'kickstart' if you
> do multiple
> installations.
> 
> If you are worried about an excess of locale data in
> individual
> packages then create /etc/rpm/macros.lang with a content
> like
> 
> %_install_langs  C:en:fr
> 
> or whatever you deem reasonable in your case and see what
> will
> happen.  There are the following problems with that:
>  - AFAIK this is not documented or advertised in any way
>  - it has no effect on packages already installed
>  - it breaks yum-presto in a manifest way
>  - savings may turn to be below your expectations
>  - somebody else using your machine now or in the future
> may find
>    out that a support for her/his desired
> locale is broken without
>    obvious ways to fix it (all affected
> packages would have to
>    reinstalled with new, possibly default,
> '%_install_langs'
>    although '--force' option to rpm will
> help with that).
> 
> Try 'rpm --showrc | grep langs' to see how you have it set
> now.
> To see what happened to files in an installed package use
> 'rpm -qs <some_package>'.
> 
>      Michal
> 
> -- 

I do not know much about this issue(locales and support of many languages), but I would like to point out some possibilities to make more people happy

1)  Fedora should continue to support as many languages as possible as it currently does, 

2)  It should allow users to remove the stuff that they don't want/need on their machines.  This includes remove dependencies on packages that should not depend on others.  

3)  How about the lzma(xz) compression, does not it save space and allow for more of the locales/languages to be included in default livecd's/spins?

4)  The DVD isos are being cut much space that had much more packages that are no longer there(texlive comes to mind as it was before on DVD and is no longer there :( )  This in my opinion is not good as opposed to the many locales/languages that are on the install DVDs and LiveCD's.

5)  I know that this is *not a valid excuse* to leave locales the way that they are currently, but we already install many things that we don't need and hard disk space does not really matter given that hard drives are getting bigger and cheaper.  It should not matter that locales/languages are taking much.  


They took away the so-called "Everything install" once, so I see the point that many users out there want the "Everything locales" taken also away to make their systems, faster, leaner and meaner :)  I respect this argument and is very valid :)

6) How are we(Fedora release engineering, Fedora team) going to accomplish this task in a way which does not tell its users, we CAN't, WON't remove the "unwanted Locales/Languages in its Fedora install media"?  This is the more important question.  

I hope I did not RANT/vent my opinions in a harmful way.  Probably filing RFE's/Bugzilla's and not see "WON'T FIX", "CLOSED, NOT A BUG" will help, but with those responses, things will likely stay the SAME :(

Regards,

Antonio