Notices

i noticed that for a bunch of apps there are 18 different l10n packages installed.

all in all i counted almost a thousand (1000!) l10n packages -- with respect to the space issues that seems totally ridiculous to me.
what's more, besides
cscz, dadk, dede, engb, enus, eses, esmx, fifi, frca, frfr, itit, nlnl, nono, plpl, ptpt, ruru, svse
there's even
mr0
supposedly a meta package -- but for issues like l10n, meta packages in debian are supposed to depend on only _one_ of the above, not all.

so, if you try to deinstall, say, skype-ui-l10n-cscz it removes -mr0 and -mr0 in turn all other -l10n and that in turn everything else of skype (same for all other apps with that exhaustive list of l10n packages).

well, the question is fairly obvious: how does one get rid of all those useless l10n packages?
is there an SOP?
i could, of course, edit /var/lib/dpkg/status or try equivs (no luck so far, for some reason the actual _filename_ of the package matters, not the Provides header)

ps: tried to file a bug in bugzilla, but some genius decided, you need yet another account for bugzilla ... apparently too hard to get a joint auth infrastructure for all of *.maemo.org?

Does "apt-get autoremove" give you any joy?

Edit. Forget that. I just read your post again.

This drove me nuts on the N810 as well. I understand that this is an internationally sold device and that not everyone likes to do everything in English... but I'm not about to change away from en-US anytime soon, and so I don't need, say, the Czech localization!

Just something that allows us to remove unneeded/unused localization information would be awesome.

if done right, it would be pretty simple -- that's what the meta packages (mr0): could be used for.
currently
skype-ui-l10n-mr0
has a Depend header like that

Depends: skype-ui-l10n-ruru, skype-ui-l10n-frfr, skype-ui-l10n-frca, skype-ui-l10n-dadk, skype-ui-l10n-itit, skype-ui-l10n-svse, skype-ui-l10n-nono, skype-ui-l10n-fifi, skype-ui-l10n-nlnl, skype-ui-l10n-enus, skype-ui-l10n-dede, skype-ui-l10n-esmx, skype-ui-l10n-eses, skype-ui-l10n-cscz, skype-ui-l10n-ptpt, skype-ui-l10n-engb, skype-ui-l10n-plpl

if all these , were | skype-ui-l10n-mr0 would depend not on all but only one of them.
it's hard to understand why the package maintainers did not do that, they still could install all l10n and the user could remove nevertheless everything not needed.

but after one week with the n900 and playing around with for instance scratchbox and maemo sdk on my amd64 linux, i got the impression, that nokia not really encourages people to use the n900 other than as a closed box.

Localizations can be removed, it's tricky as hell to do so, and not worth it all that much.

How much space l10n files take then from (different) filesystems?

well, the average installed size per package is 60k (there are a few with over 1m) -- 1000 packages will be about 60m.

It's annoying, I'm trying to upgrade and it's so slow because of all these damn l10n packages. It's stupid to split them up unless they are optional. I do care about the space but more importantly it's hard on the packaging system and makes the upgrade really slow. So please fix it!!