Re: dpkg & i18n

[Fumitoshi UKAI <ukai@debian.or.jp>]

At Fri, 22 Oct 1999 20:16:34 +0200 (CEST),
Piotr Roszatycki <dexter@fnet.pl> wrote:
> 
> I heard about a patch prepared by Debian-JP project's people.
> This patch allows to use translated fields in debian/control
> file. Is it right? Where can I find it?

I think that patch is not what you expected.  AFAIK, he made some tools
to switch translated descriptions, called `chdesc'.
 
> I noticed dselect had poor i18n support. It is difficult to
> prepare dselect to be useful for non-english language people.

Yes, dselect had poor (or even say, no) i18n support.
To be useful for non-english language people, 

 * dselect isn't yet be gettextize, so it should be gettextize first.

 * Some fields in Packages need not to be translated, for example,
   Package:, Version:, Depends:, Essential: and so on.
   However, some fields such as Description should be translated
   to make it easy to understand for non-english language people
   what the package is.  I must consider how to maintain its translation
   and distribute it.  For examples, we put Packages.<lang>.gz 
   next to Packages.gz and `LANG=<lang> apt-get update' may 
   get Packages.<lang>.gz instead of (or in addition to?) Packages.gz.

   BTW, some packages uses non ASCII characters in
   Maintainer: and Description:. 
   (apt-cache dumpavail | perl -nle 'print if /[\x80-\xff]/')
   What character sets can be used in debian/control?
   
> Did somebody try to implement i18n in dselect?

Anyway, we might try another tools to be i18ned, such console-apt or
gnome-apt (or HPML?)

Best regards,
Fumitoshi UKAI