Denis Barbier wrote: > * Package name : po-debconf > Version : 0.2.0 > Upstream Author : Denis Barbier <barbier@linuxfr.org>, > Martin Quinson <Martin.Quinson@ens-lyon.fr> > * URL : http://savannah.gnu.org/files/index.php?group_id=2756 > * License : GPL > Description : Manage translated Debconf templates files with gettext > > This package is an alternative to debconf-utils and provide tools > to manage translated Debconf templates files with common gettext > utilities. > > Merged templates files containing all translations are identical to > the ones generated by debconf-mergetemplate, so there is no > compatibility issue with Debconf. > > This package will first be uploaded into experimental, and will go > into unstable when its interface is not going to change. An example > can be found at > http://people.debian.org/~barbier/debian-installer/l10n/templates/po/ So FWIW, I support this 100%. A word to the wise: Never try to implement a translation system when you don't fully understand translation and localization and encodings. :-/ Debconf will eventually phase out the old system. So Marcin Owsiany and I have been talking on irc about fixing debconf's encoding support, and we've arrived at the following idea: * Add support to debconf for using iconv to convert utf-8 into the user's current encoding on the fly when asking questions. * Flag templates that have all their text in utf-8 by adding a field to them such as "Encoding: utf-8". If a template lacks that, debconf uses its old, slightly broken behavior of doing no charset conversion. * Since we have a transition period coming up anyway as packages begin to move to po-debconf, and since po-debconf's template po files will include encoding info, add onto this transition that po-debnconf generated template files will be in utf-8. * Which will mean that po-debconf will either need to fail if all the po files are not in the utf-encoding, or, better, if they are not in utf-8, convert their info into that encoding when it generates the merged templates file (debian/templates itself can be assumed to be ASCII, and thus will need no conversion). And po-debconf will add the Encoding: utf-8 flag to the merged templates file it generates. One concern is that I've heard that UTF-8 is really not all there for Japanese (Chinese?). I'm told that doing a round-trip conversion from Shift-JIS to UTF-8 has issues. I don't know if translators can just avoid those problem encodnings and write ja.po files that are already in UTF-8. If that doesn't fly for Japanese, we might have to come up with something more complete, such as Encoding-ll_LL fields in the templates (Encoding-jp: Shift-JIS). po-debconf would then somehow decide which po files to re-encode as utf-8 and which to leave alone, and would add the appropriate Encoding fields. Note also that the plan for debian-installer is, as I understand it, to make cdebconf templates always be in UTF-8. If someone over there has considered the Japanese issues, please lemme know. -- see shy jo
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