Re: RFD: translated description with dpkg
Steve Langasek wrote:
> I don't think this is a good reason for keeping maintainers out of the loop.
> I'm wary of the attitude that "the maintainer can't help us, he doesn't speak
> our language and doesn't care about translations". Most developers are
> interested in making their packages as good as possible, and making sure that
> they serve the needs of their users, and I think it's important that
> translators recognize this and take advantage of the very people who can be
> the best advocates for the individual packages. Also, many maintainers may
> not speak a language well enough to do their own translations, but they may
> recognize when a translator has misunderstood and be able to help the
> translator in this way. I would like to see a solution where this sort of
> collaboration is encouraged.
I agree. It would be analagous to saying "oh, most debian developers are
not graphics artists, and don't care about graphics", and so take
developers out of the loop when it comes to images and icons that are
included in debian packages. No I'm not a graphics artist. Yes I have to
rely on others for contributions of icons that look good (and I have
recently -- thanks!). This doesn't mean I shouldn't, as a debian
developer, be firmly in the loop when it comes to those images.
I don't speak German, but if I get a German translation, and then apply
it and get complaints that it sucks, I as a maintainer am responsible
for arranging the get the translation fixed. I don't speak C++, but when
someone finds a bug in some scrap of C++ that is lurking in a package I
am still responsible for getting it fixed. Others may not speak English
natively, but they are still responsible for providing decent English
package descriptions in the packages they maintain (and the proposed
system can't change that, really).
> Personally, I wonder if the /best/ solution would be similar to what we have
> in the archive now for overrides file: create a central repository with all
> of the translations, used by the archive, so that there are no delays in
> making the translations available; but submit the translations to the
> maintainer, so that they can also be included in the .deb.
I think that could be a good idea.
> > - if you put all translations in the same file, you'll have
> > encoding problems
>
> But this is a problem that must be solved anyway, because we currently do
> this with debconf templates!
I think debconf solves it, even. Others may disagree.
--
see shy jo
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