Comment # 4 on bug 1194104 from Stefan Hundhammer

In general, language-specific parts of packages are a large and complex topic;
I hope I can shed some light on that.

For YaST, we moved out translations to separate packages many years ago; that's
the yast2-trans-xx packgages. You will find that you only have a single one of
them installed: The one for your language. Check with

  rpm -qa "yast2-trans-*"

They are also not very big; something between 700 kB and 2 MB, with about 100
files each; but there are about 80 of them, so we decided that it makes sense
to split them off.

Package maintainers of other large packages made similar decisions; for example
the LibreOffice maintainers split off their localization files (translations,
dictionaries for the spell checker etc.), and they created 123
libreoffice-l10n-xx packages, one for each supported language.

Other package maintainers split off localization files into one single package
containing ALL their supported languages at once (e.g. xfce4-*-lang and other
*-lang packages) because the number of tiny packages with one or two files
would simply explode, and that would not help anyone; my moderately sized
Tumbleweed VM for example already has 2500+ packages without that, and you'd
get drowned in packages when doing any "zypper search" or similar operations if
all that would be split up even more.

So those packagers decided on an all-or-nothing approach: You can choose to not
install those -lang packages if you are happy with the original messages in the
source; they are typically English, but sometimes there is even an English
translation because the vast majority of developers use English as their second
(non-native) language, so it's sometimes awkward or even really broken.

And then there are those many packages where the packager decided that this
approach does not make much sense and simply left the localization files in the
main package.

Typically such packages have one single translation file in /usr/share/messages
and maybe one man page in /usr/share/man, and of course one of each for each
supported language; which may be very few, depending on the upstream Open
Source project.

To get an impression about the number of those files and their size, install
QDirStat (sudo zypper in qdirstat) and explore those directories. Clicking on
any individual file will also tell you what package it belongs to (it does an
"rpm -qf" call internally).



Is this situation ideal? No, certainly not. But we have to make do with the
resources we have, i.e. available package maintainers and the time that they
can reasonably spend on such things.

And the amount of packages is an ever-increasing concern. We already have an
insane number of packages, and splitting everything up even further would
multiply it. That would cause problems with resolving dependencies and with
managing packages with tools like zypper or even with management tools like
SUSE Manager.

We have to find a balance, and the current state of affairs is our compromise
to that.