Firefox language packs

[John Reiser]

Christian Rose wrote:
> On 4/20/08, Lubomir Kundrak <lkundrak at redhat.com> wrote:

>> However, for most packages we install all available translations, so
>> koffice and openoffice are rather unusual examples.
> 
> 
> Indeed -- on multi user systems, you may very well have users that
> prefer some language, and other users that use another. And a third
> group of users that use a third language, and so on. Including all
> translations means everyone can benefit from the same system.
> 
> So, unless there's a very compelling disk space issue, I see no need
> for starting to split translations as seperate rpms.

In addition to disk space there is the bandwidth and time for updating them.
30% of Fedora is language packs, dictionaries, fonts, locales, etc.
There are important use cases where a small subset (1 to 3 languages)
are all that is ever used, and avoiding the rest would save around 25%
of the total cost.  I run an independent distribution facility for current
Fedora releases (not a full mirror), and that cost is non-trivial.
For instance, it's the difference between installing on a 2GB flash memory
device, instead of a 4GB device.  It's the difference between 22GB
and 35GB of storage for my facility.  That straddles a boundary in the
monthly price that I pay.

It is particularly *IDIOTIC*, especially from the view of a distributor,
that many such .rpms are specific to an architecture, so that a language
pack comes in .i386, .x86_64, and .ppc flavors instead of just .noarch.

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