(This mail is CC'ed to the people who participated in the original discussion as well as Dennis and Davide as I need their attention..:-)) The current use of "pa_IN" for the "Punjabi (Gurmukhi)", also named "Eastern Punjabi" (Punjabi as spoken and written in the state of Punjab, India) translations in D-I, and related packages, finally turns out to be a suboptimal decision I made when we began working on Punjabi translations integration with Amanpreet Singh Alam. The misunderstanding comes from myself misunderstanding Amanpreet when he explained me the differences between the Punjabi language as spoken and written in India (Estern Punjabi, using an Indic script named Gurmukhi), and Punjabi as spoken and written in Pakistan (Western Punjabi, using an Perso-Arabic script named Shahmukhi). This combined with the lack of a special ISO 639-2 code for "Western Punjabi", made me decide to use "pa_IN" to save space for future translations in Western Punjabi, as pa_PK. However, many software (Gnome, etc.) are translated into Eastern Punjabi and are always using "pa" for the language code, and particularly naming gettext files. In short, this is established practice. So, in the future, collaborative frameworks such as Ubuntu's Rosetta or Wordforge's Pootle would have problems representing the language. As a consequence, and after talking with Ubuntu i18n people and Amanpreet Singh Alam, representing the punlinux project (Eastern Punjabi translation team), we have decided that the less destructive way to solve this is renaming the current Debian translation files from "pa_IN" to "pa" and only use "pa" to make reference to the language in the future. Future Eastern Punjabi translation will then use "pnb" which is the ISO 639-3 code for Western Punjabi in the upcoming ISO 639-3 standard. The change will take place as is and will be handled mostly by myself: -rename all pa_IN.po files to pa.po in D-I SVN -change localechooser (actually only needs changing one line) -upload it -change the output-l10n-changes script -rename the needed-characters/pa_IN file -change the languages.xml file in installer/doc/i18n -search for stuff I could have forgotten, which make reference to pa_IN in D-I -do a similar rename in *all* packages from D-I "levels" which I have commit access to (actually all of them...:-))) -change tasksel references -wait for all this to progressively integrate the various packages A few changes will need to be done by other people: -Dennis Stampfer to check D-I translation status pages -Davide Viti to check the spellchecker Please mention me anything I could have forgotten in this plan. Please object, but with *very* strong arguments as I have nearly made my decision about this topic anyway. --
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