Unwanted RPM dependencies -size of glibc-common locales

Bernardo Innocenti bernie at codewiz.org
Tue Jun 5 20:52:49 UTC 2007


Jeremy Katz wrote:

> It's more like 40.  Or 60.  Because doing it by region doesn't really
> help much -- languages are spoken across regions and trying to pigeon
> hole them like that just doesn't work.  Times however many packages this
> is done for.  It gets big _fast_.

How about just 1?  We make package foo and foo-locale with all
locales.

Space constrained embedded users and lovers of the C locale
would not install them.  My mother language is Italian, but I
know few users who actually *like* to use Linux with LANG=it.
The shell is an English/POSIX environment.  Any mixture of it
with other languages is actually going to reduce usability for
advanced users.  And novices usually don't go in the console.

Anyway, not a big deal for embedded developers: we could
also solve it by setting %_netsharedpath /usr/share/locale
in .rpmmacros.


> You end up having to track more copies of, eg, changelog data and other
> things that are "common" across a src.rpm set.  And yes, that's pretty
> costly.

I always wondered why we never trim or rotate them at some
point.  We're not running a museum.  Full history may be
useful for CVS, but for the RPMs we ship, 2-3 years should
be a good compromise.


> We used to set it.  And then people asked how to add support for a
> language after the install.  And the answer was basically "you can't".
> So we don't do that anymore.  I'd be open to having a way of setting it
> from, eg, kickstart which is much more likely to be being used in these
> sorts of "small footprint" situations.

AFAIK, MacOSX's installer does that too.  And I don't think
they have a way to add language support later.  Actually,
It seems they only made the "install" part easy, as I've
not yet understood how to uninstall packages on OSX ;-)


> deltarpms work by taking the bits you have on disk + the deltarpm and
> combining them to recreate the update rpm.  If you've opted not to put
> some of those bits on the disk, then it can't recreate the update RPM.

If deltas were done on a file by file basis, it would work
even with partial installs.

How did SuSE address these issues?  Anyone knows if they are
still using deltarpms in OpenSuSE?

-- 
   // Bernardo Innocenti
 \X/  http://www.codewiz.org/




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