ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Rodney Dawes <rodney.dawes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 2014-04-16 at 11:40 +0800, James Henstridge wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 16, 2014 at 6:14 AM, Rodney Dawes
> <rodney.dawes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >> 2) Would inline translations have any effect on the image size
> >> compared to having the translations in a .mo? (More specifically for
> >> the description bits as the question re: Names was already answered in
> >> the other thread)
> >
> > Virtually no. As plain text, the .desktop file will compress extremely
> > well, unlike the .mo files. There may be a slight increase of a few
> > bytes, for a few apps, but I don't see it causing any issue with image
> > size.
> 
> I'm curious about this.  While .mo message catalogues are a binary
> fortmat, I would have thought the majority of their content would be
> text (the english and translated versions of each string).  I would
> have thought these would compress to a similar degree as plain text.

While the string portions of the .mo files will compress fairly well,
the rest of the file does not. It is still a binary file. There is a
fair bit of extra metadata in the .mo itself, and in the strings
section, which is not necessary to have in the .desktop files, as well.

What I really meant is that the packages that contain the .desktop files
will see only a small few bytes in change. The installed size will be a
little larger than that, but still not big enough that it should have a
real impact on the default image size, I don't think.