/usr/share/locale translations have precedence over /usr/share/locale-langpack

[David Planella]

Talking with kelemengabor on IRC, we noticed that translations from some packages get installed both normally and as part of language packs. Here is the example of apt, but there are others (iso-codes, debconf-i18n, dpkg, xdg-user-dirs):

/usr/share/locale/ca/LC_MESSAGES/apt.mo
/usr/share/locale-langpack/ca/LC_MESSAGES/apt.mo

This is probably because of the fact that the installer needs to have the translations for these packages during installation, and the non-language-pack translations are just left over after installation.

The problem with this is not with actual space, but with the prededence of translations in /usr/share/locale over /usr/share/locale-langpack. What this basically means, is that newly translated messages and fixes from language packs will not be used.

What's the rationale for preferring translations in /usr/share/locale? Could we not choose /usr/share/locale-langpack to have precedence instead?

[David Planella (dpm)]

Subscribing Martin, as he's probably the best one to comment on that

[Kyle Nitzsche (knitzsche)]

Just noting that we depend on a package's installed mo files overriding those of lang packs to customize UI + translations.

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

> What's the rationale for preferring translations in /usr/share/locale? Could we not choose /usr/share/locale-langpack to have precedence instead?

The idea is that if you install an updated package from a third party location (like a PPA), or a locally built package (without pkgbinarymangler), or build something from source with make && make install, it should work and use the translations from upstream. In other words, we do not want to break /usr/share/locale/, if you put stuff in there, it's to be considered "local" usually, and thus preferred.

For the few special cases like apt [1] I'm afraid we need to manually update translations from Launchpad and put them into the package.

[1] http://bazaar.launchpad.net/%7Eubuntu-core-dev/pkgbinarymangler/ubuntu/annotate/head%3A/striptranslations.blacklist

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

(in other words, this should be "wontfix")

[Mohamed Amine Ilidrissi (ilidrissi.amine)]

Marking Invalid per last comment.