Re: [debian-devel] Packages still using old-style debconf

[Tollef Fog Heen <tfheen@raw.no>]

* Rüdiger Kuhlmann 

| >--[Tollef Fog Heen]--<tfheen@raw.no>
| 
| > Or they don't want to break their packages because of gettext having a
| > braindead design:
| > xgettext: Non-ASCII string at ../wnorwegian.templates.in:5.
| >           Please specify the source encoding through --from-code.
| 
| Actually it's not a broken design; your text is broken. The strings fed to
| gettext are what is returned in locale C; however, locale C uses ASCII and
| not latin1 or anything else.

Well, there is representation no of the string in the C locale, which
is why I'm using no_NO as my locale.  If gettext can't handle that,
it's broken.

| So you indeed have to transliterate the stuff you want to have - and
| make a en_US translation with the untransliterated characters.

This will cause translators to copy «bokmal» from the C text into the
translated text, even when they can use the full Latin 1 character
set.

I could of course make the msgstrs be «go look at the en_US
translation - 1», «go look at the en_US translation - 2» and so on,
but that's silly and broken.

I'd rather stay with the old-style debconf where this actually works.

-- 
Tollef Fog Heen                                                        ,''`.
UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are      : :' :
                                                                      `. `' 
                                                                        `-