On 2024-04-20 09:20, Stefan Seyfried via openSUSE Factory wrote:
(slowly getting slightly offtopic ;-)
Am 19.04.24 um 17:51 schrieb Martin Wilck via openSUSE Factory:
Some people still have old laptops without quasi-limitless disk space. Others have better uses for their disk space than storing support file for languages they don't use. And it's not just disk space. It's also backup space, network bandwidth, and precious user time spent waiting for updates to finish.
Then be careful what you wish for ;-) I remember when "the big texlive modularization" happened and we went from 5 to 5000 texlive packages (numbers might be slightly off).
:-) Telcontar:~ # rpm -qa | grep texlive | wc -l 3755 Telcontar:~ # I may have as many not installed: what I use is LyX and deps and recommended.
While this does not change the actual size of the update, the size of the repo metadata exploded back then. (I think the other metadata explosion was when kernel packages got every single function / module symbol included in their provides list.)
So if we split out each locale in each -lang package (~1700 right now in Tumbleweed), we might end with 10000 -lang packages and that will again make the metadata explode in size.
Not good, I agree.
In Tumbleweed it is not as bad, but try Leap 15.5, the metadata update when refreshing repos is almost always way bigger than the actual package updates.
But this might be solvable with some common sense: a -lang package which, containing all languages is only a few hundred kB is maybe not as urgent to be split up, while others like NetworkManager where the -lang package is 10 times the size of the main package and contains 64 locales might be worthwile targets.
So as I said: be careful what you wish for :-)
-- Cheers / Saludos, Carlos E. R. (from 15.5 x86_64 at Telcontar)