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Re: new proposal: Translating Debian packages' descriptions



yOn Tue, 4 Sep 2001, Steve Langasek wrote:

> Hello Richard,
>
> On Tue, 4 Sep 2001, Richard Atterer wrote:
>
> > 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?
>
> Gettext normally uses the entire untranslated string as the key in the .mo
> file.  This has many advantages when dealing with translation of strings in
> programs, where the untranslated string is actually present in the program
> source, and this is a big reason the GNU project favors gettext over catgets
> systems found on other Unices.  It makes less sense in the case of package
> descriptions, however, because we're effectively doing two lookups -- first to
> find the English description in Packages.gz using the package name and version
> as a key, then to find the translated description in the .mo file using the
> English description as a key.

<package>-<field name>






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