language-selector installs missing packages without opt-out possibility.

[Nancy Pelosi]

Binary package hint: firefox

Going to System, Administration, Language support and checking the input methods option (press Install/Remove languages to access menu) for at least east asian languages will force annoying and irrelevant packages to be installed in Lucid (10.04).

It suddenly wants to install:
gimp-help-common
gimp-help-en
gnome-user-guide-en

I already had gimp installed and it was happy the way it was without this crap.

I don't have room for these useless packages and I really don't have bandwidth to be downloading them on my dialup-like Clearwire connection. This is not an isolated problem. There are a lot of nonsensical dependencies for packages in ubuntu, but this one is pretty outstanding as language input has nothing to do with the above files.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.04
Package: firefox 3.6.3+nobinonly-0ubuntu4
Uname: Linux 2.6.34-020634rc6-generic x86_64
Architecture: amd64
Date: Sat May 22 22:05:46 2010
FirefoxPackages:
 firefox 3.6.3+nobinonly-0ubuntu4
 firefox-gnome-support 3.6.3+nobinonly-0ubuntu4
 firefox-branding 3.6.3+nobinonly-0ubuntu4
 abroswer N/A
 abrowser-branding N/A
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS "Lucid Lynx" - Release amd64 (20100429)
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: firefox

[Micah Gersten (micahg)]

Moving to language-selector as Firefox doesn't control this.

[Arne Goetje (arnegoetje)]

This has nothing to do with input related packages. The problem is, that your language installation was not complete for the English language and therefor language-selector installs the missing packages at the next opportunity, which is the next time you install anything else with language-selector.
The real bug is that it doesn't let the user opt out. This may get fixed during maverick cycle.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package language-selector - 0.6.0

---------------
language-selector (0.6.0) maverick; urgency=low

  [ Michael Vogt ]
  * add dbus backend, no need for gksu anymore (LP: #290570)
  * use aptdaemon in the gtk frontend
  * run tests at build time
  * fix "installs missing packages without opt-out" (LP: #584438)
  * code cleanup

  [Arne Goetje]
  * raise exception and display error when package cache is broken (LP: #331380)
 -- Michael Vogt <email address hidden> Fri, 28 May 2010 22:13:17 +0200