Re: new proposal: Translating Debian packages' descriptions
Hi Michael,
all in all, I think this sounds nice!
On Tue, Sep 04, 2001 at 01:22:16PM +0200, Michael Bramer wrote:
> 1.) use all the time _gettext_!
I agree, otherwise we'd just have to keep re-inventing the wheel.
> 2.) get the .po/.mo files on the system
[snip]
> If we don't like this process on the client all the time, we can
> produce Descriptions-XX.po files and the clinet must only
> download this file and save this in the right dir. But this file
> will include the orignal description and with this it has the
> double size and download time.
I don't know enough about gettext - am I assuming correctly that in
the .mo file, the English translation is replaced with a checksum or
similar, so you do not need to store the complete English translation?
> 4.) How get katie (or the desc-trans-XX.deb) the translation?
[snip]
> 5.) translated descriptions in the package.
[snip]
> I see only one problem: the size.
>
> We have now 80446 .deb packages and 7643 source packages in the
> debian archiv on ftp-master. If we include the translation in the
> deb, we must store this in the source and in every deb package.
>
> check this calculation:
> If in all sources are only one desription with 130 (geziped)
> bytes of description we get 1 MByte per languages. If we use po
> files in the source (see below), we get 2 MBytes per languages
> And all deb packages have only one description with 130 (geziped)
> bytes. This make 10 MByte per languages. If we store the
> description as po file, we will use 20 MByte per languges.
> 11/22 MByte per languages, with only 10 languages we will get
> 110/220 MBytes.
Hm, this sounds a lot, but note that relative to the complete archive
size, it's only an increase of about 1%. A well-invested way of using
this disc space, IMHO.
> With more Packages, ports, languages, this will grow. This bytes
> must all be downloaded, uploaded and synced with the time.
>
> And on the local system the descriptions and the translations of
> all languages from the package will stored on the local harddisk
> (without gzip). Count:
> With 10 languages, 1000 installed Packages and 380 Bytes per
> description and per translation you get additional 4/8MBytes on
> the local disk.
>
> Is this all usefull in a 'normal' deb package from the debian
> project? Maybe yes. We must decide this. (I personal don't find the
> real pro about this. But we can add it and I don't have a real
> problem with this. I see only the size problem, and this is not a
> big problem.)
I think it's very important to have the translations in the *source*
package.
For the binary package, I don't know... - Gnome and KDE do include all
translations, and I think it's easier to handle. Additionally, disc
space is really cheap these days, so maybe it would be better just to
include all the descriptions, too.
> In all the cases I propose: store the description in the source as
> .po file in the /debian/ dir (one per languages). This is the
> only real good way to store the translations. (no encodeing
> problem, no outdated text, no debconf-mergetemplate hack, ...)
Seconded.
> But how get the maintainer the translation? We have some cases:
> - The maintainer translate the description hisself
> - He find some own translator (like now with debconf)
> - He use the ddtp
> - He can ask the ddts and get all translations of the package
> - He can use the override file of katie
> - He use the notification mails from the ddts (In future the
> server will use the decided format in this mail. With this,
> the maintaner must only copy this file in the source.)
>
> Now the technique part:
>
> The proposal with the biggest patch, is the 'put the translation in
> a own element in the deb ar'. Maybe this is nice and feasible.
> But this is not a fast way.
>
> Because of this I propose some solutions:
>
> 1.) (very fast)
>
> put the translation as normal .po file in the
> /usr/share/desc-trans/<locale>/desc-trans.d/ dir. finish.
>
> This don't need some extra work on dpkg etc.
Actually, I think this is completely sufficient. Let the maintainer
include updated translations at his convenience in new uploads, and
use the override mechanism for the Descriptions-XX.mo.gz files until
he has done so.
Hm, but note that this means that dpkg will need to look first at
Descriptions-XX.mo files downloaded by apt, and only then at the .po
file in the package. Would that be a problem?
> 2.) Put the translation in the control.tar.gz of the deb.
[snip]
> 3.) Add the desc-trans.tar.gz in the deb ar as a own new element.
[snip]
Cheers,
Richard
--
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|_) /| Richard Atterer | CS student at the Technische | GnuPG key:
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