Re: Partial support for international description of packages
> There is ~3500 package descriptions to be translated, with maybe one or
> two more packages per day. For every es or de group that has enough
> translators, there's a lt or eo group that will have one or two that will
> probably never catch up. We'll have to wait and see, but it could become
> a problem, especially in a freeze where some translators are trying to
> complete the translation before (say) woody ships.
>
Actually there is 10420 descriptions to translate (this include short
and long description separated) from unstable/main from 16 Jan. As you
can see there are less translations that twice the number of packages,
that it is because some packages share the same short description or the
same long description and the gettext tools take care of that.
I was planning to use some scripts (written by Jaime Villate) to help
translate the .po files. Those scripts allow you to have a web page and
let the user that know 2 langs to help translate the descriptions.
But anyway, as in GNOME or KDE (not sure about it here but I guess it
works alike) if a translation it is not completed in time for release
you just ship whatever you have so far. The messages (in our case the
descriptions) that are not translated goes in as they are in the
original file.
> More questions:
> Would this mean that those non-English package descriptions would changed
> to English and then translated in their respective files? (It annoys the
> perfectionist in me greatly that the Packages file is in no consistant
> character set.)
>
Absolutely not. First of all if a package has its origial translation in
german I won't translate it because I have no idea of german and if
nobody else can translate it in my copy of Packages.gz translated into
spanish I'll see the description in german. I haven't seen any
description in other lang that english (in the other hand I haven't read
all neither), but in any case it makes no difference my script and the
gettext tools handles original vs translation and don't care about the
original nor the translation.
> What character set would the Packages file be in? This really only
> matters for maintainer's names, but tools sometimes get irrate when
> you include a Latin-1 character in an allegedly UTF-8 or other
> character set.
>
That would be a matter of another thing. What character set can apt and
other tools take care of?
Anyhow, as Gustavo as already point out each Packages.gz file can have
its own characters set based in its needs. It won't be necessary to have
the original (all english) in UTF-8 or the spanish one in other thing
but Latin-1. But of course, if for your lang you need UTF-8 we'll use
UTF-8 as long as we make that the tools support UTF-8.
Héctor
Reply to: