[Bug 2037584] Re: ubuntu-pro-client-l10n translations are stripped

[Grant Orndorff]

I ran some tests and this is what I found:

I wasn't exactly right in thinking pkgbinarymangler is stripping debug
symbols from our binary. It is dh_strip that is doing that, but on
xenial, dh_strip honors the NO_PKG_MANGLE environment variable. However
in this case the difference in resulting binary size is negligible
(<1kb).

I found two things that pkgbinarymangler is doing for us:

1. it truncates the ubuntu-advantage-tools changelog to the latest 10 entries.
2. it links the ubuntu-advantage-pro changelog to the ubuntu-advantage-tools changelog.

So by setting NO_PKG_MANGLE=1 we end up with a u-a-t binary package that
is 20kb larger (all from the changelog) and an ubuntu-advantage-pro
binary package that is also 20kb larger (also all from the changelog
since it is neither truncated nor linked). ubuntu-advantage-pro is only
installed on Cloud Pro images, though, so is less important than ubuntu-
advantage-tools which is everywhere.

It feels a bit wrong to ship a 20kb changelog when its not necessary,
but maybe it's okay.

I think we should get an SRU team decision to decide which is
preferable:

A. NO_PKG_MANGLE=1 and 20kb u-a-t changelog for x, b, f, j, l
B. SRU the striptranslations.blacklist update to x, b, f, j, l

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/2037584

Title:
  ubuntu-pro-client-l10n translations are stripped

Status in pkgbinarymangler package in Ubuntu:
  In Progress
Status in pkgbinarymangler source package in Xenial:
  New
Status in pkgbinarymangler source package in Bionic:
  New
Status in pkgbinarymangler source package in Focal:
  New
Status in pkgbinarymangler source package in Jammy:
  New
Status in pkgbinarymangler source package in Lunar:
  New

Bug description:
  [ Impact ]

  In the upcoming version of ubuntu-advantage-tools, we will ship
  translation files in a new separate binary package called ubuntu-pro-
  client-l10n.

  If you build ubuntu-pro-client-l10n with the current version of
  pkgbinarymangler, then translations are stripped and tarballed for
  inclusion in the langpack. We specifically don't want these
  translations included in the langpack for any release because pro-
  client gets updates (including strings) more frequently and many more
  times than langpacks get built.

  In order to ship those translation files in ubuntu-pro-client-l10n we
  need to stop pkgbinarymangler from stripping them at build time.
  pkgbinarymangler has striptranslations.blacklist specifically for this
  purpose, so the fix is to add ubuntu-pro-client-l10n to that list.

  [ Test Plan ]

  Since the ubuntu-pro-client-l10n package is only getting introduced in
  the next version of ubuntu-advantage-tools (v30), the fixing and
  testing of this bug needs to be closely coordinated with the release
  of u-a-t.

  Once u-a-t v30 is fully reviewed and ready to move to -proposed, we
  will first upload the fix of this bug to -proposed and wait for the
  binary proposed publication of pkgbinarymangler to complete. Then we
  will accept u-a-t v30 to -proposed.

  In order to test that this bug is fixed, we will check that the binary
  ubuntu-pro-client-l10n package built from u-a-t v30 in -proposed
  contains the appropriate translation files. We will also verify that
  translations are working in u-a-t when ubuntu-pro-client-l10n is
  installed.

  After showing all of that working together, we can mark this bug as verification-done
     
  [ Where problems could occur ]

  striptranslations.blacklist is a list of regexes, so if `ubuntu-pro-
  client-l10n` accidentally matches some other package, then that
  package would not have its translations stripped either.

  Generally, new packages in -updates on ESM releases such as xenial and
  bionic (perhaps aside from u-a-t) are surprising and unexpected to
  users.

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