Comment 4 for bug 114503

Revision history for this message
Eero Tamminen (oak-helsinkinet) wrote : Re: [feisty] language-support-* packages install firefox/thunderbird on kubuntu

> Package: language-support-fi
...
> Depends: mozilla-firefox-locale-fi-fi, openoffice.org-l10n-fi, thunderbird-locale-fi, tmispell-voikko,
> libenchant-voikko, openoffice.org-voikko, openoffice.org-hyphenation
> Recommends: language-pack-fi
...
> Package: mozilla-firefox-locale-fi-fi
...
> Depends: firefox | language-support-fi

Hm. A circular dependency. And how Firefox is a dependency alternative to language-support-fi???

Anyway, what I *would like* to see is that the language installation thing would create
the locale specific language support metapackage on the fly based on what packages are
installed to the system and just install that. This would work automatically right on all
Ubuntu variants.

That kind of a package would be trivial to create:
  if dpkg -s firefox; then
     depends += mozilla-filrefox-locale-$locale
  fi
etc.

And as to the versioning of that package, that package version needs just to increase
each time, it doesn't need to be tied to anything else.

Once a language support is installed once, it could have an option that it checks e.g.
monthly whether new packages are installed which need language support and ask
user whether they should be installed.

Alternatively solution would be an apt hook that checks new packages against a list
of packages which need locale specific language pack and which would install the selected
locale(s) package for them automatically.

I think both of these solutions are superior (work better for the user) than just fiddling
with fixed metapackage dependencies.