Re: splitting /var/lib/dpkg/status and handling desc translation (was: ddts notification)
Previously Martin Quinson wrote:
> So, you want to make possible for a package to contain meta-data about
> another package, am I right ?
Wrong, that would not make any sense.
> Or are you thinking about a separate file, not in a package, like the
> Packages.gz is ?
Yes.
> But if you put the translation in the control file, you have to add almost
> hundred fields, on per locale: Description-fr ; Description-fr_FR ;
> Description-fr_CA ; Description-fr_BE just to have the more used french
> variants (and no, it would not be acceptable to merge all country variant of
> the language in the language. Think about pt_BR and pt_PT).
Bogus. If you buy wordperfect does it have 96 different translations
in it? Of course not, they only put in a few important ones.
> Would we declare one new field in <dpkg>/lib/parse.c:fieldinfo for each one,
> choose the most used one, have a new kind of 'variable field', designating
> the Description, allowing a parameter designing the language used ?
Please let go of the idea that dpkg should keep a list of all descriptions
in memory, that is simply not reasonable. In fact forget about dpkg internals
completely, they are completely irrelevant to this discussion.
> Should we make two files, like status-essential and status-extra, or split
> it further ? Moreover, what should be the format of the new file(s) ? Also
> rfc822-complient, or something else ?
Does it really matter?
> For example, for descriptions,
> file:///usr/share/doc/gettext-doc/gettext_7.html#SEC36 gives the format of
> the binary file used by gettext. It is pretty clear and well documented. We
> could use it to store descriptions. Not only translated one, but also
> original one.
And it would mean you have a format that no standard unix commandline
tools can parse or modify, in other words it's not acceptable.
Wichert.
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