Comment 19 for bug 43071

OK, I had a look at the size of the debconf-communicate process, and in fact there isn't much we can do about that in the short term. While at first glance it seems profligate for debconf to load all translations into memory even though it isn't going to use most of them, debconf doesn't know when it starts up that it isn't going to have to write out a changed template database due to e.g. the REGISTER command, so it needs to load the whole database in order to ensure that it doesn't lose anything if it needs to save it later.

In theory this could be fixed by mmap()ing the database and just storing pointers, and that's on the roadmap for cdebconf (which we may start using for Ubiquity in Edgy), but it's far too invasive to try to do this in debconf. We'll have to live with this 12MB in Dapper.