RPM roadmapping

[Matthias Clasen]

On Tue, 2007-08-07 at 17:02 +0300, Jonathan Dieter wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-08-07 at 16:33 +0300, Panu Matilainen wrote:
> > On Tue, 7 Aug 2007, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> > > On Tue, 2007-08-07 at 14:49 +0300, Panu Matilainen wrote:
> > >> 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 -
> 
> Just a heads up that deltarpm only works if the *whole* rpm is
> installed.  If any files are missing from the old rpm (i.e. anaconda's
> excluded them because they're not the user's language), deltarpm will be
> unable to rebuild the new rpm from the drpm, and yum will have to
> download the full new rpm.

Technically, yes. 
But if you have excluded language X from your installation, what are the
chance that you are interested in the delta for language X ? rpm will
still have enough information to construct the correct contents except
for the part that the user explicitly chose not to install...