Re: Debian Debconf Translation proposal ( again )
On Wed, Jan 07, 2004 at 01:40:07AM +0100, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 06, 2004 at 11:01:20PM +0000, Colin Watson wrote:
> > On Tue, Jan 06, 2004 at 10:28:13PM +0100, Dominique Devriese wrote:
> > > 2. The translators don't try to get their work included in Debian
> > > packages. Instead they provide one package of their own, that
> > > they can occasionally release in sid if they want to.
> >
> > Didn't we do this at great length a year or two ago when the DDTP
> > started up?
>
> Yes; however, the DDTP did not live up to its promise. Having a
> completely unreadable and unnavigatable website which makes the life of
> package maintainers seeking to include the work posted there in their
> packages, the DDTP was not as successful as it could have been. The
> result was that those translations started to rot in the DDTP; given
> that the point of the DDTP was to avoid translation bit rot from
> happening, most translation teams stopped using the DDTP and started
> filing bugs again.
You miss my point, I think; I wasn't advocating the DDTP, but pointing
out that when it started up there was substantial opposition to separate
packages full of translations.
I still think that translation packages serve users no better than
single ones do. If you assert that people who only speak English don't
want to install French templates, why would people who only speak French
want to install German templates? And if you want one package per
translation then you multiply the number of packages in the distribution
by the number of supported languages; over my dead body. Plus, all of
this is needed when the main package is configured. Do you propose to
add dependencies to the main package to make sure that the subsidiary
translation package is properly upgraded before it? And, if so, why
wouldn't you simply add the translations to the main package since you
needed to change it anyway?
I see nothing but problems in this part of Dominique's proposal. Changes
to a package should be made *in that package*, not worked around by
introducing additional packages especially when the dependency structure
isn't correct. If the maintainer isn't responding quickly enough for
you, the NMU mechanism is available.
Cheers,
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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