Re: Four small programming tasks for this version or the next.

[Raimo Koski <rkoski@pp.weppi.fi>]

JF Martinez wrote:

> > > 2) Handling conflicts in installation.  This would allow us to ship
> > >     some software we can't ship now because it would conflict with
> > >     some other software we are shipping.

> > We will also solve this by making a new installer. There
> > will be differend sets of rpms: pre-install, install and
> > post-install. Post-install rpms will be language dependent.
> >
> > The installer will be ready for testing within 2 months.
> >
> 
> Caldera has a clean way to handle the problem of install scripts
> requiring software who has still not been installed: they install
> without running the scripts and run them all at the end of install
> once everything is present.

That is a bit different problem. Language specific packages could be
handled many ways but one is to have post-install which solves other
problems as well.

One other way to handle language specifics is used in Mandrake and that
is running a script at first boot up which fixes keyboard and other
stuff. It is deleted after that but it is searched each time the system
boots.

Hardest part is handling stuff that must be hard coded like KDE help
main page. They are usually fixed more elegantly with time, like i18n
packages supposedly do in KDE 2.0, but new problems of same kind will
come up.

It could be done in specific packages, but that means doing the job
multiple times. Doing it once is best done in install program. That
means expanding comps file or adding a separate file that is similar to
comps and is handled after comps.

I haven't looked at more difficult languages like russian or chinese but
I know that there are specific versions of TeX, fonts and so on for just
these languages. Then there are HOWTO's which are pain to prune if you
decide to install everything. Just unselecting all except four languages
saves some 120 MB. All these issues could be solved with language
dependent post install.