On Thu, Sep 06, 2001 at 03:42:00PM +0900, Junichi Uekawa wrote: > I have been reading the DDTS thread, and seeing that it was > resolving into a "each package should maintain their translation". I > would like to present what I think may be problematic in that > approach : > 1. This results in filing random bugs in BTS in random manner. [snip] I think there's an answer to this problem: When the maintainer updates the translations of his package, this should be fully automated. E.g. just one command update-translations --from-mbox <my_mail_archive> which fishes out the DDTS messages (which are sent in a standard layout), or, for people lucky enough to be permanently online, an "update-translations --from-web" command in debian/rules which gets the translation updates directly from the DDTS server. So far, *everything* related to a Debian package can be found in the corresponding source package. I don't think it's a good idea to change this. > 2. A package is re-uploaded with translation. There is a package > uploaded with one-line changelog saying something like "Merged > spanish templates". It is a load to autobuilder/ftpmirror/etc. and > of course manual intervention to rebuild a package means that an > error occurs, and it does. > > The main problem here is that translation start after the initial > upload of packageto Debian happens, which means there will be a "-2" > Debian package which will include the translation, and a "-1" Debian > package will have no translation. Yes, that's one of the basic problems. IMHO with the proposed "override" mechanism via Descriptions-XX.po (or whichever form it is going to have), this is mostly solved - anyone getting the "-1" package from testing will already see the translation. People tracking unstable may or may not see them, depending on how often they update and on the speed of the translators. Some people are concerned that their daily update from unstable will need too much bandwidth because of all those extra uploads. If the override mechanism works, I see no reason not to have a policy "don't re-upload if only the translation changed". > 3. No choice of "I want this locale and not others". I assume in particular you mean "I prefer this _encoding_"? This is a point that hasn't been discussed at all so far. Will there be one description .po file per language in the source package, or one for all translations? The alternatives here are: - Supply descriptions in UTF-8, and recode them for the user's current encoding on the user's machine. Nice and clean, but requires support (possibly quite extensive changes) in dpkg/apt. NB, we _do_not_ need full Unicode support in all of Debian for this, just in the tools that deal directly with the description data. - Supply descriptions in UTF-8 and recode them to a default encoding that root can configure on each machine. Do the recoding immediately after an "apt-get update" or "dpkg -i", so the UTF-8 version is never stored on the machine. Might be the way to go for the moment, even if it's not ideal. Most importantly, it is upwards-compatible with the first solution above. - Pick one default encoding per language and just assume the user uses that encoding. Problematic: Should we ever want to change the default encoding, there'll be lots of packages using the old encoding, and we'd be stuck with it. I'm all for at least _supplying_ the translations in UTF-8, even if they're not stored on the user's machine like that for now. Note that this does not even mean that the translators need to produce translations in UTF-8 - the DDTS can recode their work into UTF-8. Comments? Cheers, Richard -- __ _ |_) /| Richard Atterer | CS student at the Technische | GnuPG key: | \/¯| http://atterer.net | Universität München, Germany | 0x888354F7 ¯ ´` ¯
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