support different ways of handling installed langpacks beside apt

[decathorpe]

The current way to install support for languages (apt) is only available on debian-based systems. Please consider adding support for other mechanisms (for example, fedora's dnf), or relying on a distro-agnostic system (like PackageKit), if possible.

[Conan-Kudo]

Incidentally, aptdaemon is dead, and users of it are advised to move to PackageKit.

[davidmhewitt]

Some further information on this one:

The aptcc backend in PackageKit does not support being queried for language support packages, so PackageKit is not a drop in replacement for this unfortunately.

I'll look at implementing support for this in PackageKit, but I suspect this isn't trivial as different Debian/APT based distributions have different ways of doing this. So making it distro-agnostic within PackageKit would be hard. I'd hope they'd accept an Ubuntu specific implementation in aptcc as long as it was clearly written in a way where it'd be easier to add support for it on other distros too.

Before I go any further with this, can I confirm that Fedora's PackageKit dnf backend supports this? i.e. if you do a pkcon what-provides "language(ca)", does it list language support packages for Catalan?

[decathorpe]

Running pkcon what-provides "language(ca)" on fedora doesn't show anything.

I don't think that PackageKit can solve this in a distro-agnostic way (at least not yet). Probably an easier solution would be to support different backends (apt, dnf, etc.) in this plug. The backend could then be switched at runtime or even with conditional compilation.

How the language support stuff works with dnf in fedora can be seen at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA:Testcase_langpacks_packages

[Conan-Kudo]

All language packs associated with various installed packages are weak-installed in Fedora, automatically through the installation of a specific language pack package. They're also weak-removed accordingly when the main language pack package is removed.

As far as I know, we don't have a specific provides for languages, but that's a solvable problem, I think.