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[Feature Request] multiple optional sections in installer

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Gord Caswell
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[Feature Request] multiple optional sections in installer

Further to my musings in the Evince Portable announcement comments, is it possible to implement multiple optional sections in the installer? This would be useful in cases where only specific languages are desired in a mulltilingual installer, or where an application by default offers multiple optional components (ie. Fonts & Clipart & Templates).

[EDIT: added "in a multilingual installer" to clarify what I meant]

Simeon
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yes

I would definitively second that but only if I have for example languages and additional templates. Having an entry for every language would over-complicate things.

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John T. Haller
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Issues

The issue with this is that it severely complicates the installer. You'd have 71 checkboxes if you let people select every language they'd like. The other option is to, by default, install English + the language of the installer, but even that will require quite a bit of work for specific app to specifically handle each individual language file for each individual language. And every single app arranges these differently. Essentially, it would be custom code that would have to be maintained for every app, which we're trying to avoid.

The other big issue is the updater as a good percentage of users will no longer be interacting with the installer during updates with the next release, or during installation with the release after.

As a general rule, we are moving away from having additional languages optional except in cases where the localizations make up a very large percentage of the app. Apps like Pidgin, GIMP, etc fit this bill. Evince was supposed to be optional as well but I forgot to add it on release.

From a technical standpoint, the one thing I was considering was with the 2.1 Installer release (which will internalize all PA.c language variables) to allow an option to remove non-selected languages after install. For some apps like GTK apps, this would be possible via the language variable. It won't save time during install or total space required during install, but it will decrease install size after install.

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Gord Caswell
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Makes sense, thanks for the

Makes sense, thanks for the reply. What about cases where there are multiple optional components, other than languages?

John T. Haller
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Unsupported

We're allowing installers to have a single optional component and that's it. We don't want to get into the case of installers with lots of options (as it's honestly just confusing overload to the user).

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