Re: support for multilingual Packages files?
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On Wed, 4 Jul 2001, Radovan Garabik wrote:
<snip>
> > one description out of 4000 in Swedish. It gives us a Package file with no
>
> Swedes gain. Nobody would gain if it were in English, because:
> 1) the package is of no use if you do not speak swedish
> 2) if you speak swedish, you can have description in swedish.
> And since swedish is then probably your native language, you would prefer
> the description to be in swedish to english
This would all be correct if only package managers and users would have to
deal with packages. But that is not the case.
- - There are porters that sometimes need to know what a package does to do
their job right.
- - We have archive maintainers (the people from ftp.d.o) that *do* need to
know what a package does in order to do their job right. Not just
occasionally.
- - If you're running a shell-box that everyone can sign up to, you'd better
know what software you're running. If you don't know swedish, but 75% of
your users is from sweden and wants this particular piece of software,
you can't really help them since you can't trust one of your users
translating the description (this package might be a security horror
without you knowing... and obviously, if you want to use it since
there's no alternative, you won't tell the system administrator...).
It's nice to, for instance, do the following:
Description: foo package
This package is a foo package, only interesting for those who speak
Dutch. The package is meant to do bar and foobar on a serial line.
.
A description in Dutch follows:
.
Dit pakket is een foo pakket, alleen interessant voor mensen die
Nederlands spreken. De bedoeling is dat je er bar en foobar mee kunt doen
op een seriële lijn.
Now, both English and Dutch-speaking people can read the description. And
for those who wonder and don't speak Dutch: yes, the Dutch part is just a
translation. But don't omit the English part, since at some times, people
tend to need the description, even if they don't need the package.
<snip>
- --
wouter dot verhelst at advalvas in belgium
www.debian.org
resistance is futile, you will be packaged...
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