On 2016-01-07, Mark Wielaard <mjw(a)redhat.com> wrote:
Hi,
I noticed one of my packages (elfutils libelf) installs a small library
of 90K but also 1MB of .mo locale files. Given that this package will
always be installed because it is on the critical path I thought it
might be nice to split the locale files out into language packs so
that you could create a smaller install. But I cannot find documentation
on how to create langpacks. Is there a description of the conventions
used for language packs and/or example rpm macros to help create them?
I'm against this because then elfutils will behave differnently than any
other packages. If you don't care about elfutils messages, you probably
don't care about other package's messages too.
RPM has a run-time macro allowing to exclude localization files from
installing them. That's the reason why the message catalog files, if
packaged properly, carry a language attribute in the binary RPM package
metadata.
Utilizing this feature (as well as documentation stripping) is job for
a package manager. For DNF.
(There is another hypothetical approach based on sub-packaging the
message catalogs that resembles your idea, but the approach was
postponed until Fedora will have support rich dependencies.)
-- Petr