Ability to not install gnome documentation and openoffice support

Julien Lavergne wrote:
> Public bug reported:
>
> Binary package hint: language-selector
>
> On a LXDE desktop (GTK environnement), there is no need for openoffice
> support or gnome-documentation. But, using language-selector for
> managing languages support is nice to have, so it would be nice to have
> the ability to not install thoses depends. Reading quickly the code, I
> think the best way to do it is to write a frontend, subclassed from the
> standard gnome frontend, and to overrides some function to exclude
> thoses packages.

oo.o translations only get installed if openoffice.org-common is already
installed on the system or is going to be installed. Likewise, the gnome
translations and docs are only installed if libgnome2-common is present
on the system or going to be installed.

Does your LXDE installation depend on either of those?

Cheers
Arne

Thanks for the quick answer.

For oo.o, I don't have openoffice.org-common. When I try to install Translation, it only install language pack (which is good). But if I check "Spellchecking etc ...", all oo.o is installed.

For libgnome2-common, yes it's installed and I think it pretty common, even on a non-GNOME environnement. Maybe it could depends on a package like yelp or gnome-user-guide ?

Julien Lavergne wrote:
> Thanks for the quick answer.
>
> For oo.o, I don't have openoffice.org-common. When I try to install
> Translation, it only install language pack (which is good). But if I
> check "Spellchecking etc ...", all oo.o is installed.

Yes, language-support-writing still pulls in the oo.o-hyphenation and
-thesaurus packages. That can be fixed easily, the infrastructure is
already in language-selector. So, the intended behaviour is to just
install them if oo.o-common is installed and 'Writing' support is wanted
for that language.

> For libgnome2-common, yes it's installed and I think it pretty common,
> even on a non-GNOME environnement. Maybe it could depends on a package
> like yelp or gnome-user-guide ?

Need to ask Martin Pitt for comments (subscribed).

I think "gnome-panel" is a good representative package for "wants GNOME".

For sorting out the dependencies, I see two options:

 * All the openoffice.org* packages get entirely removed from language-support-writing-* (in the langpack-o-matic lists), and instead we leave installation of those to language-selector.

  This would mean that we'd need to explicitly seed the thesaurus and spellchecker for English on our CDs (which is fine, we just need to not forget it)

 * We put back the alternative dependencies to "| language-support-writing-$LANG" to openoffice.org-{thesaurus,dictionary}-$LANG, so that if someone only installs language-support-$LANG it doesn't automatically pull in openoffice.org as well.

What's the preferred option here?

Martin Pitt wrote:
> I think "gnome-panel" is a good representative package for "wants
> GNOME".

ok, I can change the dependency to gnome-panel. But LXDE would also want
the GTK translations, and those are also in the -gnome- langpacks.

> For sorting out the dependencies, I see two options:
>
> * All the openoffice.org* packages get entirely removed from language-
> support-writing-* (in the langpack-o-matic lists), and instead we leave
> installation of those to language-selector.
>
> This would mean that we'd need to explicitly seed the thesaurus and
> spellchecker for English on our CDs (which is fine, we just need to not
> forget it)
>
> * We put back the alternative dependencies to "| language-support-
> writing-$LANG" to openoffice.org-{thesaurus,dictionary}-$LANG, so that
> if someone only installs language-support-$LANG it doesn't automatically
> pull in openoffice.org as well.
>
> What's the preferred option here?

With Option 2, the user would then need to explicitly install the oo.o
stuff. I think, option 1 needs to be done nonetheless.

So, I would go forward with implementing Option 1.

OK, after discussing with Martin Pitt, we can do the following for Lucid:

 1. move oo.o stuff out of language-support-writing-* and let it be dynamically installed by language-selector if openoffice.org-common is installed on the user's system.

 2. move the gnome-user-docs dependency from libgnome-common to gnome-panel.

The gnome help files need to stay in the language-pack-gnome-* packages for now. In future, LXDE should probably get its own language-packs, which include all necessary translation bits, including gtk. Then the language-pack-gnome-* packages wouldn't be needed anymore for LXDE installations.

Do you agree with that?

Sound good. My main concern was the oo.o problem, we can deal with the gnome help files later. Thanks for your help on this :)

This bug was fixed in the package language-selector - 0.5.1

---------------
language-selector (0.5.1) lucid; urgency=low

  * add fallbacks for nds_DE and nds_NL to data/languagelist (LP: #531422)
  * add fallback for be_BY@latin to data/languagelist (LP: #146681)
  * fontconfig/*: make the fontconfig snippets valid against the dtd.
    (LP: #387868)
  * add openoffice.org-hyphenation* and openoffice.org-thesaurus* do the
    dynamically generated package list. Change the dependency for gnome-
    user-guide* from libgnome2-common to gnome-panel (LP: #529048)
  * stop thunderbird and openoffice.org localization packages to be
    removed when installing a new language. (LP: #519289)
 -- Arne Goetje <email address hidden> Thu, 11 Mar 2010 21:47:00 +0800

rebuilt the language-support-writing-* packages and removed all openoffice.org-* dependencies from them.