Comment 8 for bug 1089549

Sorry for the reply which didn't make sense, I typed that quickly and to be frank rather annoyed after having to deal with the stack of bugs duplicates you filed for this issue...

> The symlinks should obviously be shipped in the packages that provide the file being pointed to.

if you have a good idea on how to implement that, feel free to share it ;-)

The issue there is that the language pack just collect translation files from rosetta, they have no knowledge of what the installation path should be, keeping all the sources in sync with a langpack would be lot of work. The advantage of the current system is that the process is simple and robust, we just replace files by symlinks during the build and then we do export those in a standard location for the language packs.

> It looks like this problem is self-inflicted pain in Ubuntu. Debian doesn't seem to have done this mistake.

Right, Debian doesn't have language-packs, they force you to generate all the locales that exist and to have translations for all those languages installed, eating some hundred megabytes of disk space and bandwith every time you do an update. The situation is a win for most users since there is no reason the symlink problem should be visible to a desktop user.

> your reference of "it doesn't after only the language packs".

sorry, wanted to refer to your statement "this does not only concern the Italian language or only the language packs after all." ... could you point in files in that list which are not shipped by the language packs?

Bottom line: yes, it's not a perfect solution, yes it's a but, yet it's the best we manage to come with to keep the system simple and robust. You are welcome to raise the issue on <email address hidden> if you think it requires discussion (not so many people will read and participate on an evince launchpad bug).

In practice you can probably filter out the noise by redirecting stderr so you don't have those errors in your log