Re: Reasons why package central approach to handling translations may be suboptimal
On Thu, Sep 06, 2001 at 03:31:49PM +0200, Richard Atterer wrote:
> 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.
full agree
> > 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".
full agree
> > 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.
see below
> Will there be one description .po file per language in the source
> package, or one for all translations? The alternatives here are:
In a .po file is only one languages.
So we have n Description.po file (n = Number of supportet languages).
A User must only downloads the needed Descriptions files.
In the source we have control-de.po, control-fr.po, control-es.po, ...
maybe all in one subdir.
> - 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.
no, don't re-invent the wheel. This all make gettext. We don't need
patch apt, dpkg, other toold this way.
We must only use a old, nice and tested tool: gettext.
> - 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.
we don't need this all
> - 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.
yes, we use one default encoding per languages in the ddtp.
> 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.
In future the ddts will make this and send UTF-8 encoded po files. I
have get a request von Wichert to use UTF-8 only. We can latin-X etc
recode to UTF-8, so this all is no problem.
Gruss
Grisu
--
Michael Bramer - a Debian Linux Developer http://www.debian.org
PGP: finger grisu@db.debian.org -- Linux Sysadmin -- Use Debian Linux
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