Ability to not install gnome documentation and openoffice support

[Julien Lavergne]

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.

[Arne Goetje (arnegoetje)]

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

[Julien Lavergne (gilir)]

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 ?

[Arne Goetje (arnegoetje)]

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).

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

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?

[Arne Goetje (arnegoetje)]

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.

[Arne Goetje (arnegoetje)]

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?

[Julien Lavergne (gilir)]

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 :)

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[Arne Goetje (arnegoetje)]

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