Re: Is there some guideline saying that native packages should be avoided?
> I would like to ask whether there really is such a guideline, and if so,
> which are the technical / political reasons that lead to it. I have
Wearing my i18n hat, I can add one reason, certainly not THE reason
but yet another argument to avoid native packages except for
Debian-specific stuff (apt, dpkg and the like...).
When packages are internationalized, we (Debian i18n team) recommend
translators to first focus on them if there is translation work to do.
The rationale for this is that translations for Debian-specific stuff
is better coming "from the Debian world" while other packages are
likely to be translated by some other way.
So, making a package Debian native gives it some priority for being
translated first.
There are already a few i18n'ed packages in the archive that are
native packages and are actually NOT Debian-sepcific (xmorph, lpe,
pdbv, rpncalc, wxwidgets2.6)....I'd really like not seeing more..:)
I think I have reported a bug against all of them and, IIRC, the
maintainer's arguments have not been very convincing..:). moreover,
several of these are currently obviously not maintained. Some have
pending French translations since more than 1 year.
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