I have made some tests to check what is the exact impact of a new language added to Debian Installer.
The procedure was the following: - identify which packages included in a netboot i386 initrd are localised - recompile these packages from a fresh d-i checkout - in another branch, run l10n-sync after commenting the new language in packages/po/PROSPECTIVE. This adds all xx.po files to the d-i packages - activate this language in languagechooser - recompile the initrd packages from that branch - in both checkouts: - copy the recompiled udebs to "localudebs" in installer/build - "make build_netboot" Then I compared the size of the uncompressed initrd images. The result when activating Vietnamese is: -rw-rw-r-- 1 bubulle bubulle 8567808 2005-04-29 22:22 initrd-novi-trunk -rw-rw-r-- 1 bubulle bubulle 8585216 2005-04-29 22:22 initrd-vi As we see, adding the Vietnamese language has added 174087 bytes to the initrd. So, as a rough estimate, we can probably assume that adding a language costs us about 18kb in the initrds. About the memory impact: I have booted mini.iso images in qemu up to the languagechooser screen. Then I switched to VT2 and issued the "free" command: With Vietnamese: 15524kb of memory are used Without : 15460kb of memory are used At kbd-config step: With : 15580 Without : 15520 At ethdetect step (I can't go further as for some reason my mini.iso fails to load the net driver): With : 15756 Without : 15716 So, funnily, the difference seems to decrease with the progress of the various steps...:). Joey probably had a good explanation for that, but indeed it seems to me that the major impact is on initrd sizes but it is still quite manageable. -- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
