This is just a friday-morning-newbie-thought so don't kick me too hard:
IIRC i18n is annother long term goal of Debian. But why not start working
on this goal now without panic to be ready with it for Debian 4.0? Here is
my suggestion:
We could start to allow multi-language descriptions in the control-files.
This gives many mantainers the opportunity to add descriptions in all
languages they know. The form could be something like:
Description: <normal english description>
<more description>
Description[de]: <german description>
<more german description>
A form like this could be used to collect non-english descriptions, but we
don't need to use them now. The script for creating Packages.gz could weed
out the non-english descriptions so that no harm is done[1]. Maybe Debian
4.0 will have a Packages.gz for every supported language, who knows. This
is of no importance right now.
We could start the multi-language-business right now before we have to
translate 2000+ package-descriptions in 3 months (between two releases),
perhaps crossing one or more deadlines.
Just my thought...
Thimo
[1] Ok, I don't know how this is done internally, so maybe I'm utterly
wrong
--
Thimo Neubauer <thimo@debian.org>
Debian 2.0 released! See http://www.debian.org/ for details.
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