New to Fedora (And RPMs) - How do i stop language support rpms being installed?

[seaghan]

A Chairde,

I just moved to Fedora 11 from Debian and that _thing_ called ubuntu (which is turning into a brand lock-in hell (try 9.10) like .. well.. MS Windows)
One thing i miss from the debian based distros is the APT package management, i seemed to have a greater control over what and what isn't installed. YUM on the other hand just seems sooo slow! and im having terrible difficulty in getting rid of unnecessary packages. Ive found that im downloading language support for languages ill never learn to use. I'm all up for language support, Im an Irish speaker! (which needs better support all round) but downloading support RPMs for example Afrikaans, Telugu, Tamil, Punjabi, Polski , Kurdish... the list goes on.
I've tried removing packages using PackageKit (slowly one at a time...) and each time i remove one, another one (even more obscure) is magicaly found. I seem to have supports for Fonts, Writing systems, Individual language packs for Firefox, Thunderbird etc. never mind just translations of GNOME and the CLI
Is there a way to just uninstall the whole lot, and just install the ones I actually can use (Hiberno-English , Gaeilge , Spanish, French, German , Welsh and Scots Gaelic)

As i said before, I'm all up for Language support and its great that its an out-of-the-box experience but is there a way of reducing the support after the box is thrown away?

I'm also having terrible trouble with removing netbeans (i switched to eclipse), there seems to be so many inter-dependencies with eclipse than expected. Like the netbeans platform itself cannot be removed without removing eclipse...

Does anybody have any suggestions? Maybe I'm thinking more debian rather then redhat here and im going about this the wrong way.

Anyway,
Is Mise, Le Meas,
Seaghan Mac Aodha

[scottro]

Well, in firefox, basically you can't. As for others, I'm really not sure--as per another thread on the forums, one has to be VERY careful removing them, because there are so many unneeded dependencies and some essential programs sometimes get thrown otu.

So, the answer, as far as I know, is you can remove them very carefully, after doing yum remove whatever see what it plans to take with it. Now, even if, afterwards, you do rpm -e --nodeps instead of yum the chances are that when you next update some program or another, the language will be put back.

Yes, it's bloat, and almost certainly unnecessary, but apparently, that's the way it is, and, sad to say, this is the drawback of the FeBuntu distros--that is, the desktop distros--you lose control though you gain convenience.

Other ways simply aren't feasible unless you're in a bored, too much free time mode, which would be, perhaps, to figure out what packages pull them in and install all those packages from source.

And yes, Fedora/Ubuntu and all the desktop distributions do seem, to many old timers, to be more and more MS/Apple like everyday, but only in the bad aspects.

Cynically yours,

[seaghan]

Sigh. well at least if i decide one day to take up some obscure language, i can count on my fedora to have it already installed for me!

Handy in those rare occasions, but completely nonsensical in terms of download bandwidth and install space. But I suppose I cant complain, its not as if language support is taking up a mass amount of space in comparison to my music collection. And the system is certainly a smaller foot print then any version of Windows NT!

As for other RPM dependency hell problems, I guess I'm just going to have to be real careful of what i install because i can count that removing it isn't going to be quite straight forward as I thought.

Go raibh míle maith agat!
(thanks x1000)

[stoat]

Hello seaghan,

Then maybe you would be interested in the concept of a minimal install that is then built up with only what you want using yum. I started doing that myself when Fedora 9 fell on us. There was busted stuff all over the place as usual on release day, only worse than ever. Anyway, I liked the minimal thing so much that I continued installing that way ever since then. I also use the XFCE desktop environment instead of Gnome. I liked Gnome, but that thing was big-time busted in F9 due to the so-called rewrite going on at the time, and that led me to discover XFCE. The result IMO, is a slimer sleeker faster system.

Anyway, because of this thread, I browsed through my installed package list and the available package list. I don't have those language packs installed. At least, not that I can see in the form of rpms. Maybe some apps have them built-in, but I don't know what to do about that. Just something to think about.

[Hlingler]

If you get really bored (or very motivated), you can always go into folder /usr/share/locales/ and just start erasing stuff. At your own risk, of course, so be careful as to what files/folders you select to vaporize. Will break deltaRPMs. Will be reversed by the next update(s) that dumps ../locale/.. stuff onto disk. Numerous packages (mostly user apps with GUI) contain language support translation files that get dumped into this "holding cell", so the files are "owned" by many different packages.

You can remove language support groups, but that mostly removes font packs, and again: the dependencies can be unreal.

At one point, there was a suggestion for an RPM macro filter that would automatically filter out such locale files; it seemed to work for me for a while, but I think it fizzled. Oh, well.

V