Thoughts about separating language packs

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Fri, Nov 05, 2004 at 12:44:31AM +0100, Martin Pitt wrote:

> Matt Zimmerman [2004-11-04  8:28 -0800]:
> > - What happens if the package is built with a stock build environment which
> >   does not perform the extraction?  The package's files will overlap with
> >   the language pack.
> 
> Right, but I think this problem does not depend on a particular way of
> extracting the stuff. If we want to have Ubuntu specific language
> packs (which was a feature goal), then we just need to require an
> Ubuntu specific build system as well.

An Ubuntu-specific build system is not a problem, but what are you
proposing?  That if a user builds a package from source, the localisations
are thrown away?  Or that users will be required to rebuild the language
pack?

Note that users will sometimes build a newer version of a package from
source (i.e., one newer than their language pack).

This brings about another question: how do we ensure that the language pack
is in sync with the application package?  The only solution which comes to
mind involves a _very_ large Provides: line in the language pack. :-)

> > - How can we ensure that the language packs are up to date at release time?
> 
> I suppose the only way to ensure this is to finally build the language
> packs after all other packages of a release have been built. And of
> course we have to rebuild the whole distribution from scratch.

Perhaps we should introduce the concept of a string freeze, as is done with
d-i for translations.

> >   We wouldn't want a security update to cause some language support to
> >   disappear, for a package which hadn't yet been built with the modified
> >   build environment
> 
> Most security updates certainly won't touch translations, but if they
> do, then we really have a problem.

Right, they won't; the condition was that the package had not yet been built
with the language-pack-enabled build environment.  But given your plan of
rebuilding everything, that is a moot point.

-- 
 - mdz