> > 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