Re: dpkg & i18n
On Sun, Oct 24, 1999 at 03:04:03AM +0900, Fumitoshi UKAI wrote:
> * 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.
IMO, the internal fields need to stay the same. Translation should only be
for external viewing. For this reason, using gettext on the package fields
is a no go. Some sort of internal structure of the translations is needed.
As for the future, more than likely, all package tools will need to
abstract from using field "names" and implement a strictly programatic
parsing of each of the fields. This could be done by specific ordering of
the fields in their static storage (flat file, db2, etc..). I suspect that
dpkg wont be able to handle any of this (much less our package handling
tools) correctly any time soon.
Just some thoughs,
Ben
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