On Mon, Oct 01, 2001 at 04:27:13PM +1000, Hamish Moffatt wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 01, 2001 at 01:41:05PM +1000, Martijn van Oosterhout wrote:
> > What's wrong with using the recently discussed Debian Translation Server for
> > this. Add the language English and people can then submit corrected
> > descriptions for each package.
>
> Because that would be an ugly hack?
well apart from the fact the translation server is not the official way to do
it yet, ie no general consensu from all developers (does such ever happen
anyway) I thought it sounded quite clean, and less of a hack than special
casing english.
In debian currently english is a special case of language, just as i386 is a
special case of architecture, in theory there should be a debian-i386 mailing
list in the ports category.
It seems debian has decided to special case the handling of i386 and the
handling of english, whether this is good or bad who knows as it has not been
done any other way.
However I must say in most programming and similar fields special casing of
some procedure rather than making it more general is a bad thing and must be
justified, justification of "thats hwo we have always done it" does not cut
it, although AFAICS that is the justification for the special casing of
english and i386 in debian.
Admittedly the argument that i386 and english is in the majority may hold some
warrant in the debian community, though more in the case of i386 than english
(as a primary architecture vs primary language developers use)
See You
Steve
--
sjh@wibble.net http://wibble.net/~sjh
Look Up In The Sky
Is it a bird? No
Is it a plane No
Is it a small blue banana?
Yes