Description of problem: as of FC5, the firefox extensions dialog has become WAY (too?) CUMBERSOME... 32-ish language packs that cannot be removed from the list (by normal user accounts, at least) make it significantly more difficult to manage user-installed extensions... it's unnecessary tedium to wade through the list looking for them... a more user-friendly way of supporting all those language packs would be to check the locale and install them as needed... OR an alternative would be to install them all and leave them installed, but just not clutter the extensions list with them. OR an alternative would be to add ONE EXTENSION that manages the installatation of other language packs as needed... i'm sure this may seem trivial, but really it shouldn't be necessary to play needle in a haystack games to manage a few installed extensions...
Moreover, unlike most configurable options, these language packs are reinstalled each time the firefox package is upgraded, and a normal user needs to run firefox as root (twice) to wade through the list and get rid of them. Installing between several dozens of language packs ranging from Czech and Bokmal to Chinese and Catalan is not a sane default on almost any system.
This also seems to be causing big problems for our users: Firefox and Thunderbird are taking > 1 minute to start up the first time they are started after logging in. Deleting all the unneeded language packs makes this problem go away (i.e. only takes around 10 seconds to launch, within reasonable expectation)
I think ooo was in similar situation. There the language packs are in separate files now (openoffice.org-langpack-bg_BG-2.0.4-5.5.10). The same is true for KDE too - kde-i18n-Bulgarian-3.5.6-0.1.fc6. Maybe rpm needs a way to 'half-install' a package (subpackages)?
Created attachment 154908 [details] use %lang for langpacks At least, marking as %lang will allow user to select which one to install with %_install_langs macro. Here is a very simple patch proposal
Fedora Core 5 is no longer supported, could you please reproduce this with the updated version of the currently supported distribution (Fedora Core 6, or Fedora 7, or Rawhide)? If this issue turns out to still be reproducible, please let us know in this bug report. If after a month's time we have not heard back from you, we will have to close this bug as CANTFIX. Setting status to NEEDINFO, and awaiting information from the reporter. Thanks in advance.
In Fedora 7 all languages are in a separate tab (FF2), which makes the situation better (not that 99% of the users need more than 2). In FC6 (FF1.5) the situation has not changed a bit AFAIK. Reassign to FC6?
I am afraid that this won't get fixed with 1.5.* -- unfortunately, we have more than enough work to do on fixing more serious bugs. Patches are more than welcome. I am sorry that we cannot help more.
*** Bug 433163 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Commment #4 has a patch attached that would still work. This is a Fedora specific change and neither upstream nor other distros have this afaik. Something need to merge the spec file changes. That's all.
this seems to be a duplicate of bug #355791
the patch from 355791 got used a bit ago. duping there i guess. but it's in f9 *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 355791 ***