Moodle: language packs and FC-4

[Jerry James]

Thanks for the feedback, Ville and Jason.  Incidentally, I should
publicly note at some point that my presence here is all Ville's fault.
:-)  If he hadn't prodded me, I'd still be doing this:

  http://www.cs.usu.edu/~jerry/Projects/RPMS/

I hope to move many of the RPMs there to Fedora (although some of them
cannot be moved for licensing reasons).

Jason L Tibbitts III <tibbs at math.uh.edu>, on Wed, 11 Apr 2007 at
22:03:13 -0500 you wrote:
>>>>>> "JJ" == Jerry James <Jerry.James at usu.edu> writes:
> JJ> 1) Download all of the language files and include them in one
> JJ> monolithic moodle SRPM.  Split out the installation and use files
> JJ> for each language into a language subpackage.  This lets us keep
> JJ> all the files for a particular language in one place, but means
> JJ> that anytime an individual language file gets updated, we have to
> JJ> rebuild the whole thing.
>
> That may not be much of a problem if the language files don't change
> much more often than the package itself.

I'm a pretty new moodle user, so I don't yet have a feel for how often
they change.  Plus, I've been ignoring the language packs anyway, since
I am a native U.S.an teaching at a U.S. school.

> JJ> 2) Embrace the fact that the installation language files are small
> JJ> (a few hundred bytes to a few K apiece), and partially unnecessary
> JJ> anyway.  Just put them into the main moodle package (once!).
> JJ> Create separate SRPMs for each language file with the date stamp
> JJ> for the version number.  Now language packs can be updated
> JJ> individually, but this also means that I will suddenly be the
> JJ> maintainer for 60+ additional packages in which I have no personal
> JJ> interest.
>
> I'd expect the maintenance overhead of one of these to be low, but
> having to rev 60 of them at a time might be just plain annoying.

That's my worry, yes.

> I think the final decision rests with you; you need to determine how
> much time you can invest and how much process you're willing to put up
> with.  Perhaps you can find someone willing to assist you in
> maintaining these?  I suppose that if nobody is willing to do so, you
> could simply drop those languages in which you're not interested.

I don't want to spend much time on the language packs, since I will
never use them myself.  I'm going to try option (1) and see how it
goes.  I probably won't be terribly snappy about updating language packs
off of the moodle release cycle, though.

Thanks,
-- 
Jerry James, Assistant Professor        Jerry.James at usu.edu
Computer Science Department             http://www.cs.usu.edu/~jerry/
Utah State University