Comment 12 for bug 409764

Martin-Éric Racine wrote:
> Timo, I fully agree with your assessment and that's why my initial
> request was to simply downgrade mozvoikko and ooo-voikko to Recommends,
> but I'm told that all language writing aids packages are automatically
> built and, as such, either we depend upon something or we don't. As an
> alternate solution, Arne suggested making it a special case for the
> language pack installer, which allows defining arbitrary dependencies on
> a per-language basis.
>
> Arne, am I correct in assuming that you use 'germinate' to seed your
> package dependencies? If yes, then it should be possible to perform what
> was initially asked by dividing seeds into Depends and Recommends items.
> For instance, ubuntu-meta does this rather well.
>

no, we don't use germinate for language-support packages. They are built
with langpack-o-matic.

Putting the depends in language-selector was only the first step. Now
all packages, which have such additional translation or writing aids
need to be changed to include a hook in the postinst script to call
language-selector and pull the necessary packages depending on which
language(s) the user has installed. I know this is messy and will
require user interaction (right now we can only display a notification
window and the user needs to click on a button to launch
language-selector), but it's the best we can do right now. The
debian/ubuntu packaging system unfortunately is a bit limited in this
regard.

BTW: Recommends: are also pulled automatically nowadays, so that
wouldn't solve the problem. A Recommends: mozvoikko in the
language-support-writing-fi package would still be installed by default
and would pull whatever dependencies it has.