Why does Ubuntu puts Firefox transalation in gnome’s language pack ? (2)

A day after presenting the question, seems like a user got a problem I didn’t thought of. He didn’t like Firefox 3 and decided to install Firefox 2 instead.

The problem is that he now has Firefox 2 and the translation for Firefox 3 (from the GNOME package). Same problem occurs with the Hebrew interface… The solution is to manually delete the Firefox 3 files, and than install the mozilla-firefox-locale-he-il package.

Don’t forget that this should be done on every update of the language-pack-gnome-he-base package (or any other language than Hebrew)! So who’s in favor of splitting the Firefox 3 translation to another package ?

Why does Ubuntu puts Firefox transalation in gnome’s language pack ?

The other day, Tomer from Mozilla Israel contacted me to update me that the Israeli Ubuntu community changes the Firefox translation and doesn’t contribute the changes back. We sorted out the translation process with the Ubuntu people who were very open for comments.

After that, Tomer mentioned he sees the changed translation in Hardy. I searched for the mozilla-firefox-locale-he-il with the right version, but it seems that package is still for Firefox 2.

I checked the firefox-3.0 package itself to make sure the translations aren’t there, and indeed it only contains the en_US locale. Tomer told me he still sees the Hebrew translation but “dpkg -l | grep firefox” doesn’t give up any other related packages.

Tomer started to search his file system for the missing files, and I started to check out packages’ contents trough packages.ubuntu.com (well, I don’t run Ubuntu…). The files were found, and it seems they are part of the language-pack-gnome-he-base package.

This sound very odd to me:

1. Why link between GNOME and Firefox? (and while doing so, leaving out Tunderbird)
2. What about people running Kubuntu? They probably won’t have GNOME installed.
3. The package description says that it doesn’t include the Mozilla translations:
   

   Please note that you should install language-support-he to get full support for this language (spell checkers, OpenOffice and Mozilla locale packages, etc.).

4. This change creates an broken upgrade path so it doesn’t support people upgrading from Firefox 2 to Firefox 3 in Ubuntu keeping their locale, as the firefox locale package doesn’t get updated, and doesn’t pull the new package.
5. These packages were introduced about 1 week before the Hardy release. I would expect such a change be done in an earlier stage of the release…

I thought about starting to report bugs about a few of these issues, but it would be better to first hear what other people think about this.

Why does Oracle’s applications needs xscreensaver in order to run ?

Working with some of Oracle’s products, made me wonder about their installation requirements as appears in the documentation.

Let start with Oracle® Database 10g Release 2. The installation guide for linux x86 says under “Checking the Software Requirements” it needs the following RPMs for RHEL 4.0:

• binutils
• compat-db
• compat-libstdc++-296
• control-center
• gcc
• gcc-c++
• glibc
• glibc-common
• gnome-libs
• libstdc++
• libstdc++-devel
• make
• pdksh
• sysstat
• xscreensaver
• setarch

Most of them are valid requirements when needing to compile C/C++ code (as it may be done inside the database). But why do I need to install gnome’s libraries, gnome’s control-center and xscreensaver?

I fail to see how are these 3 are related to running a database. It is reasonable to require these packages for running a graphical installation, but that’s not a runtime requirement! I even tested that with checking the database opened files while it’s been running.

I really don’t want to have these packages installed on servers unless I must, as I believe server should contain the minimal software required on top of the distribution default installation.

Another funny (and weird) fact is that for SELS 9.0 there isn’t any requirement for gnome’s control-center. For RHEL 3.0 there aren’t any requirements for the 3 packages…

Mentioning optional requirements are probably the best why to solve this, unless there’s some real requirement that eludes me. John Smiley’s “Installing Oracle Database 10g Release 2 on Linux x86″ has this for openmotif21 which is mentioned as needed only for Oracle demos.

The same happens for Oracle® Enterprise Manager in installation guide for linux x86 10g Release 2 (10.2), but this time the package requirements for RHEL 3.0 and SELS 9.0 don’t mention any of the 3 packages, whilst they are required for RHEL 4.0. Very weird.

The status for Oracle Application Server 10g Release 3 is similar.

I would be happy if someone could shed some light on the issue.