Unwanted RPM dependencies

[Jeremy Katz]

On Mon, 2007-06-04 at 22:59 +1000, David Timms wrote:
> My second size concern comes from glibc-common, specifically the 
> /usr/share/locale {283 MB}  ( but also and  /usr/share/i18n/ 10MB)
> 
> I notice that there are dependencies listed in comps.xml for what gets 
> installed when a language is chosen {eg dictionary and openoffice 
> translations}. This could be extended to the gazillion locales supported 
> by glibc and fedora. The maybe most commonly installed individual 
> locales could be made into separate packages {guessing ! english french 
> german spanish portuguese ? ?}, and then continent or similar for the 
> rest of the locales {noting that there is often sub-locales for some 
> reqions} {eg african latin-american asian european} ? Installing 
> European would also get the more specific english/french/german loc's.

And your tradeoff is that instead you have X packages more worth of
metadata to download to discover packages/updates.  Plus more space
spent on the rpmdb, etc.  Splitting things like this out is a losing
battle that really ends up costing more in the long-term that it helps.
Not to mention that this stuff in comps is at best a crude hack that has
all kinds of weird side effects and user interactions.

Note that you can have RPM not install properly "tagged" locale files
not installed by setting the %_install_langs rpm macro.  But your
tradeoff by doing this is you won't be able to use deltarpms and to add
locale support later, you have to entirely reinstall packages.

Jeremy