evolution's documentation should be split in locale packages to save space

[Jeff Fortin Tam]

Here is a discussion that happened on the ubuntu-desktop mailing list on Sat, 19 Apr 2008 01:28:31 -0400:

"The evolution-common package in ubuntu weights 93.4 MiB. After openoffice.org-core, this is the heaviest package installed in ubuntu by default. I personally like evolution, and I'd like it to be kept part of the default installation, I was just wondering: what on earth can be so heavy in evolution-common? They certainly don't have over 8 million lines of codes like openoffice, no?"

======
emilio@saturno:~$ dpkg -L evolution-common | grep '\.png' | wc -l
1370

That's mostly the images for the documentation. It ships the images for a lot of
locales, as some of them are localized.
======
And why aren't those in an evolution-doc package? Why not split this into evolution-doc-$locale packages, and have them only installed by the good old language-support-$locale?

[Jeff Fortin Tam (kiddo)]

this would also save bandwidth whenever you folks apply updates/patches to the evolution-common package, if the documentation is part of the separate language support packages.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

thank you for your bug report, that's not really a bug, something which has already been discussed, which might not been evolution specific and which should probably be discussed on the mailing lists and not on a bug tracker where almost nobody will read the request

[Jeff Fortin Tam (kiddo)]

well, it originally *was* discussed on the mailing list, but nothing happened no? hence the current bug report.

I also thought that this bug report would directly grab the attention of the ones assigned to packaging evolution. What else can be done?

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

opening bugs for that is not really useful, the ubuntu team is aware of those issues but splitting documentations this way is not ideal, it creates divergence over debian, requires to manually add those depends to language packs, create extra index entries in the package database and wouldn't scale. It could be done for some packages if required but what would be better would be to discuss a strategy to have those in language-packs which would work for everything and not require to do extra changes to the sources

[Andrew Starr-Bochicchio (andrewsomething)]

I'm going to take a shot at this as discussed with seb128 in #ubuntu-desktop.

evolution (2.25.90-0ubuntu3) jaunty; urgency=low

  * debian/control:
   - Split documentation into seperate locale packages.
   - Replace Recommends on yelp in evolution-common with
     evolution-documentation which is Provided by the
     evolution-documentation-{*} packages.
   - Make evolution-documentation-{*} Depend on yelp and
     Recommend evolution-documentation-en and
     evolution-documentation-common (which contains the C locale)
     as fall backs.
  * Create evloution-documentation-{common, cs, de, el, en,
    es, fr, mk, oc, ru, and sv}.install files.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

thank you for your work there, some comments though:
- no need to add a documentation-common, don't split the C locale documentation rather
- the enhances and recommends on -en are not really useful
- the new binaries to have a replaces on evolution-common << 2.25.90-0ubuntu3

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package evolution - 2.25.91-0ubuntu1

---------------
evolution (2.25.91-0ubuntu1) jaunty; urgency=low

  * New upstream release. (LP: #330340)
   - Bug Fixes:
      #333716 : Do not store incomplete or broken files in a cache. (Milan Crha)
      #404232 : Rebuild view immediately for an advanced search too. (Milan Crha)
      #548623 : No auto-proxy at the moment. (Milan Crha)
      #554458 : Make content type from a mime type first. (Milan Crha)
      #555888 : Do not overwrite user settings with system proxy settings. Register
      signals at the end, when all widgets are read. Hide socks settings, it is not
      used at the moment. Use proxy configurable within Evolution. (Milan Crha)
      #564229 : Do not use uninitialized variable. (Milan Crha)
      #567089 : Do not crash when no From set yet. (Milan Crha)
      #568176 : Make the migration dialog look better. (Gilles Dartiguelongue)
      #569700 : Stop reading from a network when operation was canceled. (Milan Crha)
      #569986 : Crash while printing (Srinivasa Ragavan) (LP: #327383)
      #570364 : Mark a string for translation (Gabor Kelemen)
      #571625 : Use black/white for foreground instead of active/inactive text color
      (Chow Loong Jin) (LP: #329125)
   - Other contributions:
      Use -mwindows on Windows to build a "GUI" executable. (Tor Lillqvist)
      Do not use non-zero page size in an adjustment, it's deprecated now. (Milan Crha)
      Format signature/encryption information nicer. (Milan Crha) (LP: #60608)
      Function-declaration compiler warning. (Suman Manjunath)
      Remove unneeded #include <libart_lgpl/...>. (Matthew Barnes)
      Substitute some deprecated gtk functions. (Andre Klapper)
  * debian/control:
   - Split documentation into seperate locale packages. (LP: #272779)
   - Replace Recommends on yelp in evolution-common with
     evolution-documentation which is Provided by the
     evolution-documentation-{*} packages.
   - Make evolution-documentation-{*} Depend on yelp and
     Recommend evolution-documentation-en as a fall back.
  * Create evloution-documentation-{cs, de, el, en,
    es, fr, mk, oc, ru, and sv}.install files.

 -- Andrew Starr-Bochicchio <email address hidden> Fri, 13 Feb 2009 13:38:07 -0500