Results of the App Installer Meeting

[seth vidal]

On Thu, 2011-01-27 at 15:49 +0100, Bruno Cornec wrote:
> Samuel Verschelde said on Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 03:36:20PM +0100:
> > Le jeudi 27 janvier 2011 15:30:31, Richard Hughes a écrit :
> > > On 27 January 2011 13:53, Samuel Verschelde <stormi at laposte.net> wrote:
> > > > Another way to do it without making the xml file grow too much would be
> > > > to have one xml file containing only package descriptions per language.
> > > > It uses some space on mirrors, but not that much (especially because the
> > > > number of applications is really smaller than the number of packages).
> > > 
> > > I thought we agreed it would be better to have all the languages in
> > > one file, rather than having 130 files all with a few k of text
> > > inside? Lots of tiny files really hurts read and write performance.
> > > (130*number of repos installed = thousands)
> > > 
> > 
> > Another thing to keep in mind is that users usually use only 2 languages on 
> > their computers : their mothertongue and english when there's nothing better 
> > available.
> 
> I still think that Linux is a multi-user system. So I know univ where
> they do install lots of native language support, because the systems are
> indeed used by lots of different native speakers. 
> 
> Just hope that whatever choice is made, it won't prevent that usage.
> 

We've been working on a similar problem with general translations with
yum's repodata and trying to keep it from exploding when you have a repo
with 20000 pkgs and 30 translations.

The one file per language does handle how the translators give data and
then the advantage you get is that the user process can fetch a single
translated file based on the locale of the user.

An option is a 'default languages' option to allow the clients to
automatically fetch specific language translations on each sync of the
repodata.

I agree that a system can have multiple users with different languages.
But in that case whomever is taking care of the system is very likely to
know what languages those are.

It let's the admin step around the problem and it is a simple fix.

-sv