Bug#265161: More ideas about this bug

[Christian Perrier <bubulle@debian.org>]

Pasting some exchanges on IRC:

bubulle	fjp: SHORTLIST_TRANSLATED is whatr is in the translations, SHORTLIST is in the original template
	bubulle	in other words, the original values are: Belgium, Netherlands, other and SHORTLIST has "Belgium, Netherland" when language is nl
	bubulle	and translated values are "België, Nederland, andere" and SHORTLIST_TRANSLATED has "België, Nerderland"
	bubulle	The default, inherited from languagechooser is "Netherlands" or more precisely the 2nd value of the list....
	joeyh	I was thinking last night that it would probably be faster and use less space to make countrychooser ship with N predefined country shortlist templates, one for each language in languagechooser, each would be translated into only the language you must select to get it
	fjp	bubulle: but if I do countrychooser/debian/po$ grep SHORT *, I only get "${SHORTLIST}", so that is what will be shown to the user...
	bubulle	fjp: sure....but one the tempaltes I have in the package I hacked you would have ${SHORTLIST_TRANSLATED] in all Choices-xx fields
	fjp	I think you need to also replace "${SHORTLIST}" by "${SHORTLIST_TRANSLATED}" in the .po files
	bubulle	fjp: done....at least in fr and nl which is enough for my tests
	fjp	OK, that's what I was just checking as my first idea of what might be wrong...
	bubulle	joeyh: that may be an idea but indeed, the templates are already virtually fixed at build time anyway
	fjp	continues thinking
	joeyh	there's some very slow (on older HW) stuff done at runtime
	fjp	joeyh: see me idea for the UTC problem in tzconfig?
	bubulle	yep, this is the cat_shortlist function
	fjp	s/me/my/
	joeyh	fjp: yes, but I think I'll just leave it as is for sarge and fix it right (format strings for hwclock) after
	bubulle	joeyh: fixing translations in templates would just save us the /etc/shortlists file which is currently 1939 bytes
	joeyh	it would also solve your issue with it using localised values in the choices list
	bubulle	but this would make the templates file bigger
	bubulle	joeyh: yes
	bubulle	tries to imagine how we could generate the Choices-xx fields at build time.
	bubulle	probable *after* dh_installdebconf by hacking the generated DEBIAN/templates file
	fjp	joeyh: Wouldn't that mean that you would have to know what format string is preferred for each locale (if you still want to present the time in local format)?
	bubulle	joeyh: I think this can be done, yes
	bubulle	as a side effect, this would save us the long blue screen on old HW
	bubulle	I think we have the idea
	bubulle	let's paste this in the BTS...:-)

As a conclusion, the plan could be something like:

in debian/rules, after dh_installdebconf, put something like this

for po in debian/po/*po ; do
  lang=`basename $po .po`
  .../... 
    (some stuff for building a list of countries for which lang has
     at least one valid locale --> $SHORTLIST_TRANSLATED$
  cat debian/countrychooser/DEBIAN/templates | sed \
     '/^Choices-${lang}.UTF-8/s/SHORTLIST/${SHORTLIST_TRANSLATED}/' \
     >debian/countrychooser/DEBIAN/templates.new
  use new templates
done

I'll hack some dirty stuff and then after, some better shell script
writer will be able to clean my mess../-)

As a side effect, this would save the very slow call to
cat_shortlist() in postinst and speed up contrychooser a lot.


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