Hi Morten! El 30/08/14 a les 21:05, Morten Bo Johansen ha escrit:
Hi Martin, Okay, that was pretty straightforward: The gettext message file was not there because I use the localepurge program. I installed it manually and now the program starts fine. Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe that usually the English messages are part of the program's source code (and thus compiled directly into it) whereas only the message files with translations into other languages are held in separate gettext message catalogs.
It's true that it is the most common case that the string identifiers for localization are at the same time the English translation and therefore can be used as a fall-back without any external files. However, I've seen other cases. Many programs, especially the ones written in scripting languages like Python, rely on external resources in order to work properly.
If you want to have it the way it is now maybe you could a check for the presence of the localepurge program in the debian "preinst" script and issue a warning to the user that the program will not run if the English message catalog is deleted?
I personally don't think the "songwrite" package is to blame here, but rather "localepurge" for being overly eager.
I'm not officially related to this package, so I don't take decisions (just helping out), but I must say that considering how Debian announces the "localepurge" package, I don't think there is much of a chance to get a check like the one you proposed(or even a patch integrating the English strings into the source code) into Debian:
"Please note, that this tool is a hack which is *not* integrated with Debian's package management system [...]. This program interferes with the Debian package management and does provoke strange, but usually harmless, behaviour [...]."
(https://packages.debian.org/wheezy/localepurge)IMHO the way to go would be to define exceptions in the "localepurge" script. However, it seems like the developers are not interested in this feature right now: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=202214
But maybe you could try to convince the "songwrite" upstream developer to create a fall-back strategy in case the locale files are not available.
Cheers, Martin
Thanks, Morten