Adding languages...

[Noah Silva [Mailing list]]

>
> I.e., we have two language exclusion mechanisms, and the installer is
> inconsistent in the way it uses them.  Which is not to say that being
> consistent would make everybody happy.  If we made it consistent in
> that all langs were installed, some would complain even more about
> spending disk space on translations they don't use.  If we made it
> consistent in installing only what the user asked for, many would be
> inconvenienced by the need for reinstalling packages to get additional
> languages.
>
> What would make things better IMHO would be to transparently break up
> lang-specific bits into separate rpms, and have some form of
> conditional dependency in rpm or in dep resolvers that would enable a
> user to install additional language meta-packages later on, that would
> bring in the localization packages by means of dependencies of the
> form `if package X is installed, install X-lang'.

This seems like a good plan, but would result in there being many more
packages.  Besides that, though, I will admit to being a little recent to
Redhat/Fedora, but at least in Debian, it seemed like when I installed a
package, it installed all languages for that package.  I thought that was
"how things worked" in linux - which I liked, compared to trying to have
two languages of the same software package installed in windows.  What a
nightmare!

If the language files took up so much space though, I could see a solution
similar to man pages working out.  They are installed gzipped, and
unzipped on first use.

The problem I am referring to is more that the fonts might not be there,
or the IME packages needed to enter Chinese might be hard to add later on,
etc.

> Or we could turn it around, and have a dependency in X such as `if
> lang-L is installed, require X-L'.
>
> Either way, it's more work for dep solvers, but I see other nice uses
> for such conditional dependencies.

My real question was, how do you -tell- if lang-L is installed.  Does the
installer save this somewhere?

(Anyway I tell people now: Install any languages you or anyone who uses
this computer might need when you install Fedora...)

 -- noah