[packagekit] installing languages

[Richard Hughes]

On 8 July 2011 11:32, Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo at gnome.org> wrote:
> The method to know the packages to be installed differs from distro to
> distro. For instance, Ubuntu has a script:
>
> $ check-language-support -l es
> firefox-locale-es gimp-help-es libreoffice-help-es libreoffice-l10n-es
> myspell-es openoffice.org-hyphenation wspanish
> $ check-language-support -l en_GB
> firefox-locale-en gimp-help-en hyphen-en-us mythes-en-au mythes-en-us
> openoffice.org-hyphenation

You you know how exactly check-language-support works? Does it do it
by looking in /usr/share/locale for subpackages of packages already
installed?

This also needs a little more work, as if we do:

InstallResource ("locale", "es")
- firefox-es gets installed
InstallPackage ("thunderbird")

Do we also install thunderbird-es? Logic would say yes, although that
would mean keeping a system wide "list of installed languages"
somewhere. This seems a little bit of feature creep for PK, although
I'd have no problem at all if PK was to gain support for a
newly-created /etc/xdg/installed-system-languages type file. I think
yum also has some kind of functionality to auto-install languages
using some hacky plugin but I'm not sure how they do it.

> Not sure how other distros do it, so I was thinking about having a:
> InstallResource ("locale", "es")

InstallResource ("locale", "ES_es") surely?

> call on the session bus interface, so that desktop apps can just call
> that and have a UI be shown to do all the installation. Then, each PK
> backend would have to retrieve the correct list of packages to be
> installed
> Comments?

I think it makes a lot of sense to put this kind of distro logic in
PK. We just have to work out all the details. :)

Richard.