Re: debconf template translation

[barbier@linuxfr.org (Denis Barbier)]

On Thu, Feb 27, 2003 at 06:28:19PM -0600, Steve Langasek wrote:
[...]
> Before you declare that package maintainers delay the process, I think
> you should make more of an effort to put these templates in the hands of
> maintainers, which IS the right way to get this done.  I don't see how
> you can claim maintainers are delaying the process when you're not
> involving maintainers IN that process.
[...]

Delay is not the only problem.
I filed many bugreports to make DD realize that they must put translated
templates into separate files.  Some DD did not like this idea because
(choose your option)
  a) merging templates at build time unnecessarily consumes autobuilders
     CPU time
  b) adding a build-dependency against debconf-utils make their packages
     "unpure"

Since debconf 1.2.0, encoding of localized fields can be specified within
field name.  This allows encoding conversion when user's charset is
different, which will become more and more common because of UTF-8 support.
Po-debconf must be used instead of debconf-utils in order to generate
translated templates with such fields. but according to
  http://www.debian.org/intl/l10n/po-debconf/
very few packages (around 30, plus debian-installer packages) made this
transition.

The BTS has no special tag for l10n related bugs, so I can't easily follow
bugs related to my favorite language.

Etc.  Thus if there is a solution which improves l10n without having to
waste my time with endless discussions, I'll be happy.

Denis