Re: Translating Debian packages' descriptions
Le Sat, Sep 01, 2001 at 02:17:01AM +0200, Richard Atterer écrivait:
> I may be mistaken, but I had the impression that the discussion showed
> that the approach Grisu originally proposed had a number of
> organizational and technical problems. Still, your summary mostly
> follows this approach.
Yes, I kept the original proposition because it doesn't have that
many flaws, I mentionned the 2 real flaws identified. Other were
either solved or wrong as far as I understood.
> With language-specific Packages files, there is no size issue.
Sure there is. We'll have 50 Packages file where we have only one
actually :
$ find /mirror/debian -name 'Packages*' | xargs cat | wc -c
18940993
And that's a mirror where we I only have i386. So multiply by 10 arch,
then by 50 languages, and you get 10Gb of Packages file. We could reduce
that if we remove uncompressed Packages but still ...
And a good part of those packages files changes daily ... so the mirror
need to download many data each day. That's not acceptable.
And as we know the size of Packages file is only growing with the number
of packages. The impact would be much less if the description was only
in some package-description-<lang> .deb (they are compressed and there's
no redundancy between several arches).
> The *only* additional infrastructure with this is a little support in
> dpkg/apt (output right header from control, download Packages-<lang>),
> plus an override mechanism - unlike your solution, which requires code
> to handle all the gettext stuff as well as management of the
> translation package (which would be automated, but that automation
> also needs to be coded). I fail to see why you think this solution is
> preferable.
The solution proposed by grisu needs much less modification to dpkg/apt
than the "perfect" solution that we can't afford to implement right now.
The gettext modifications are *easy* ... (so easy that we could even
implement it for woody if a decision can be taken, but that's another
story).
Modifying dpkg and apt as you require is a much bigger change than the
one proposed here.
I'd like to have the opinion of Wichert and Jason for dpkg and apt.
What do you think about the working solution proposed here ?
> Hm, IMHO the package maintainer should be intelligent enough to notice
> that he has made an incompatible change to the templates, and as a
> result delete/comment out all the translations. Or did you use
> translations from a different source than the package itself?
No it was the translations provided by the package itself, i'm not
involved in any translation effort but I feel that the idea of grisu and
martin are good, so I support them here by explaining better why
it's a good solution until we can afford the perfect solution.
Cheers,
--
Raphaël Hertzog -+- http://strasbourg.linuxfr.org/~raphael/
Le bouche à oreille du Net : http://www.beetell.com
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