Comment 14 for bug 409764

Martin-Éric Racine wrote:
> The Debian/Ubuntu packaging system is not limited at all. That's what
> Recommends are for. :)
>
> Rather, the limitation seems to be in langpack-o-matic, which is
> apparently incapable of producing binary control files with package
> relationships other than Depends.

Well, we could do it if we hack it in on a case by case basis, but
that's messy.

> Recommends can be skipped using --without-recommends on Aptitude. They
> can also be removed afterwards without affecting the package that pulled
> them.

1. the default package manager on Ubuntu is synaptic, on Kubuntu it
would be kpackagekit (or whatever that application is called now), not
aptitude.
2. the average user who installs Finnish language support uses either
language-selector (which calls synaptic or kpackagekit) or chooses
Finnish language on installation time. In both cases Recommends: will be
pulled automatically.
3. Asking the user to manually remove the packages does not sound user
friendly to me.
4. the limitation in the debian/ubuntu packaging system I was referring
to can be described as: it is currently not possible to pull a package
in if multiple conditions apply, i.e. language-support-writing-fi pulls
mozvoikko, but only if one of the mozilla related packages is already
installed or is going to be installed. This logic is currently not
possible, but would be needed for our cases, not only for
mozvoikko/oo.o-voikko, but also for additional translation packages,
which cannot be shipped in language-packs at the moment (e.g.
thunderbird-locale-*, gnome-doc-*, kde-l10n-*, ...).
Users have complained before that we pull in applications like
thunderbird by default, because the language-support-translation-*
packages depend on them... this still would happen with Recommends:, so
this is not the solution.
Therefor the workaround in language-selector which gives us exactly the
needed functionality.
But of course it would be nicer to have a logic in the package manager,
that if you install thunderbird and you have language-packs for
languages foo, bar and baz installed, that the corresponding
thunderbird-locale-* packages get installed also. Who knows, maybe we
will get there in future... :)