https://bugzilla.suse.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1194104 https://bugzilla.suse.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1194104#c4 --- Comment #4 from Stefan Hundhammer <shundhammer@suse.com> --- 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. -- You are receiving this mail because: You are on the CC list for the bug.