Bug#419595: libpango1.0-udeb: undesirable new dependencies

[Theppitak Karoonboonyanan]

On 4/20/07, Josselin Mouette <joss at debian.org> wrote:
> AFAIK these libraries are only needed by the Thai language module, not
> by the pango library itself.
>
> I don't know how critical this module is to proper Thai support in the
> installer. Theppitak, do you know about it?

It provides proper line wrapping for Thai messages.
As Thai words are not delimited by spaces, missing it would
mean that some long continuous texts would exceed
screen boundary and be wrapped at random positions,
and the right margin of normal texts would be heavily
ragged, due to relative lack of line break positions.

OTOH, achieving it costs around 900 KB additional memory
(roughly measured by the difference between loading leafpad
with and without pango-thai-lang module).

So, it's a trade-off. If that's too much for marginal improvement,
we can drop it from d-i. (So far, I haven't heard users'
complaint about this on Etch installer yet. But I can't be sure
if that means they are OK with it. Not all of them install
Debian with GUI installer.)

> If it is necessary to have it, we can split the thai module in a
> separate udeb to avoid the dependency inflation. Otherwise, we can
> simply remove it from the udeb.

IMO, this issue is not so critical, as long messages are rare
in d-i, compared to usual desktop apps, and we have the
whole screen as the space, not varying window sizes.

-- 
Theppitak Karoonboonyanan
http://linux.thai.net/~thep/