i18n of tasksel (and cdebconf)

[Tomohiro KUBOTA <debian@tmail.plala.or.jp>]

Hi,

I would like to supply Japanese translation (po files) for tasksel.
However, it is already reported [1] that tasksel has problems on
handling of multibyte and multicolumn characters like Japanese.  Thus,
addition of Japanese translation may cause Mojibake [2].

[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-i18n/2003/debian-i18n-200308/msg00020.html
[2] http://www.debian.or.jp/~kubota/mojibake/

I am now coping with this problem.  I found that tasksel works well
with the following two modifications:

  (1) Use slang1a-utf8/slang1-utf8-dev instead of slang1/slang1-dev.
      This enables displaying multibyte/multicolumn characters, not
      only UTF-8 but also various encodings such as EUC-JP.  Of course
      simple 8bit encodings such as ISO-8859-15 are also supported.

  (2) I wrote a library "libtextwrap" [3] and its Debian packages
      (libtextwrap1 and libtextwrap-dev).  Use it for text-wrapping
      (in other words, line-folding).  It supports multibyte encodings,
      mulitcolumn (or fullwidth) characters, combining characters, and
      languages which don't use whitespaces between words (you know,
      ordinary line-folding algorithm depends on an assumption that
      words are separated by whitespaces, which is not valid for Chinese
      and Japanese).  I uploaded the Debian package (initial upload)
      two days ago and it is not available for Sid yet.

[3] http://libtextwrap.sourceforge.net/

I can supply a patch for tasksel because I have already tested it,
but there seem some (possible) problems on this solution:

A possible problem around (1) is that slang1 is "Priority: required"
and "Section: base" while slang1a-utf8 is "Priority: standard" and
"Section: libs".  I don't know whether tasksel's depending on
slang1a-utf8 affects this situation.

A problem around (2) is that Debian packages of libtextwrap1 and
libtextwrap-dev will need about 10 days to be installed into Sid,
because it is the initial upload.  I think this library is stable
enough because it is simple, small, and a port of libtext-wrapi18n-perl
which debconf-i18n depends on.  Do we have enough time to wait for
the libtextwrap1/libtextwrap-dev packages while we are starting
release process for Sarge?  If no, tasksel can use libtextwrap's
source code directly.


As written in the mail [1], cdebconf has the same problem, though
I have not tested yet.  (I found that cdebconf seems not to support
templates generated by po-debconf.)  Since debconf templates are
*already* translated for various packages which are available in
Sarge/Sid, cdebconf will have to support displaying these translations
if it will be used for installer for Sarge.  Otherwise cdebconf will
have to disable translation.

Any comments?

---
Tomohiro KUBOTA <kubota@debian.org>
http://www.debian.or.jp/~kubota/