If you don't use debconf in your packages, you can hit n now. I'm writing to bring people up-to-date on some recent changes in debconf. Managing translations with po-debconf ------------------------------------- The system for managing translated debconf templates has changed. Where before you put translations in odd little debian/templates.ll files and used debconf-mergetemplate to merge them at build time, the new system uses standard po files, in debian/po/ll.po, and po2debconf, from the po-debconf package, is used to merge them at build time. Many of you are still using the old system, or worse, not keeping translations in separate files at all. The main reasons to update to the new system are: - Translators can use standard po files, and do not need to learn anything new. - The tools for managing the po files, updating them, and so on in po-debconf are much better than the old tools in debconf-utils. - Perhaps most importantly, the old system does not provide encoding information to debconf, and this can result in garbage being shown to some users who use UTF-8, etc. po-debconf corrects this problem. It is fairly easy to convert a package to use po-debconf. The debconf-gettextize program can convert your existing debian/templates.ll files to po files automatically. See the po-debconf(7) man page for details. If you use debhelper, dh_installdebconf will automatically detect and use po-debconf when appropriate. I hope that all packages will be using po-debconf to manage their debconf translations before the next major release of debian. You will probably get a bug report eventually if you do not. The old tools are already deprecated, and will spit out warning messages when run. New debconf-2.0 virtual package ------------------------------- This is slightly premature, but I will mention it anyway. We would like to eventually let debconf be swapped out for cdebconf (the reimplementation in C done for the debian-installer project) on at least some systems. To that end, a new virtual package, "debconf-2.0" was added to policy. It will be provided by both debconf and cdebconf eventually, and all package that declare a dependency on debconf will need to be changed to depend on debconf-2.0 instead. (The "2.0" refers to the debconf protocol version.) It's probably premature to change any dependencies yet. You could, and things would work, but your package may be held out of testing even after the glibc logjam unsticks. I will make another announcement when it's time to start this conversion, and of course dh_installdebconf will be changed to insert the Right Thing at that point as well. -- see shy jo
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