Monday, November 01, 2004

Packaging thoughts

kde/koffice-i18n
Packaging translations of KDE has always been a pain. In idea we can package the translations sorting them by language (which is relatively easy now) and by application. KDE does not provide per application (ie. konquero-i18n, kdm-i18n) or even per module (kdelibs-i18n,kdebase-i18n) tarballs.
To make the image worse, KDE-i18n is one big mess. 60% of build time is sensless directory changing due to the ac/am design of kde-i18n. Add to that the fact that .pot files removed from templates dont imply removing .po files from translations, what results in 25-30 obsolete files per branch and +5 new obsolete ones every version.
Migration to SVN and/or KDE4 should be a good moment to actually redesign kde-i18n.

debian
The debian subfolder in KDE CVS is quite a nice feature, includes lists of installed files during make install, descriptions of installed applications, manpages for executables and stuff. I just do not understand why was it up to debian to make such info, actually KDE should have done it itself, anyways a big thank you to debian folks for that directory.

2 comments:

djurban said...

Hmm testing...

Unknown said...

Don't tell me about KDE and i18n - I will have to do all the packaging for Kexi this week - propably I'll end up with making a script for the cvs just to download all the kexi.po from every locale (have you seen a list for cut&paste somewhere?).
IMHO the cvs structure is completely nuts - reminds me of a relational database completely without relations between "records" know here as cvs directories ;|