Re: Bug#160284: ITP: po-debconf -- Manage translated Debconf templates files with gettext

[barbier@linuxfr.org (Denis Barbier)]

On Tue, Sep 10, 2002 at 09:55:29PM -0400, Joey Hess wrote:
[...]
> So Marcin Owsiany and I have been talking on irc about fixing debconf's
> encoding support, and we've arrived at the following idea:
> 
> * Add support to debconf for using iconv to convert utf-8 into the
>   user's current encoding on the fly when asking questions.
> * Flag templates that have all their text in utf-8 by adding a field to
>   them such as "Encoding: utf-8". If a template lacks that, debconf uses
>   its old, slightly broken behavior of doing no charset conversion.
> * Since we have a transition period coming up anyway as packages begin to
>   move to po-debconf, and since po-debconf's template po files will include
>   encoding info, add onto this transition that po-debnconf generated
>   template files will be in utf-8.
> * Which will mean that po-debconf will either need to fail if all the po
>   files are not in the utf-encoding, or, better, if they are not in
>   utf-8, convert their info into that encoding when it generates the
>   merged templates file (debian/templates itself can be assumed to be ASCII,
>   and thus will need no conversion). And po-debconf will add the
>   Encoding: utf-8 flag to the merged templates file it generates.

Thanks for the spotlight.
Just to make it clear for other readers, po-debconf was only intended to
ease translators' life by allowing them to work on PO files.  Merged
templates files are unchanged, so this discussion about debconf
improvements is orthogonal, we only have to ensure that merged
templates files generated by po-debconf are always compatible with
debconf.  As you said, PO files contain all infos needed by debconf,
so there should be no problem here.

Denis