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Re: (my) summary about translated description with dpkg (still RFC)



On Tue, Sep 04, 2001 at 11:46:17AM +0200, Michael Bramer wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 04, 2001 at 10:39:00AM +0200, Chris Halls wrote:
> 
> How will the translated Description be stored in the deb Package?

Sorry, I wasn't addressing that :-)  I was expecting to use the solution
that would need to be worked out as a result of your statement:

> > > The more controversial point of our proposal is that we where planing
> > > to centralize the translation in a way that keeps the maintainer out
> > > of the loop. But it's not the key point, it's an add-on which ease the
> > > work of translators. Each package can still provide the translation
> > > and be 'self contained'.

My proposal simply lets all packages be 'self contained'.

> > You now have translated descriptions integrated into the .debs,
> > and it is possible to generate the Packages.<lang> files for use by the
> > modified dpkg/dselect as was originally suggested, except that the
> > translations are coming from the .debs instead of a single server.
> 
> Packages.<lang> are a hack.
>
> What are Packages.<lang> file? Files with the English and the
> translated Description? Only the translated Description? With a
> Description or a Description-<lang> tag? With the other tags?

Oh yes, I was referring to the older solution.  

s/Packages.<lang>/Packages.po

(i.e. use the Packages.po format you suggested - I'm just suggesting
always generating them from .debs in the same way as Packages, instead of
introducing a seperate centralised system)

> some cons:
>  - apt-get don't know about the translation with this
>  - if you will use some languages, you must download some Packages
>    files with all the tags.
>  - We have _now_ on ftp.d.o 316 Packages files with 141 MByte of size
>    _without_ translation... 
>  - you must patch apt in a whole

I think your objections are because I didn't talk about Packages.po,
aren't they?  Do your objections still hold if you use Packages.po?

>  - maybe we get outdates translations (like debconf)

Yes, the issue is not solved totally MIA maintainers, who never
initiate a package rebuild.  But at leat, any NMU rebuild by someone else
(or qa?) would then automatically fold in your updated description
translations to the package, compared to the sometimes hit-and-miss affair
of a BTS request which the maintainer may or may not integrate into the
package.  Using this suggestion, the 'default case' of a maintainer doing
nothing to the translations when rebuilding would pick up the translations
(provided they at least did an apt-get update every now and then!).
Compare this with the debconf template situation: If the maintainer does
nothing, the translation rots in the BTS.

Chris



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