Re: RFD: translated description with dpkg
On Wed, Aug 29, 2001 at 06:58:59PM +0200, Wichert Akkerman wrote:
> Previously Michael Bramer wrote:
> > We propose the central translation for dpkg and co. But how should this
> > work?
>
> Sorry, but not. dpkg translations will stay inside the dpkg source
> otherwise it is simply not maintainable. Also realize that dpkg is
> work on non-Debian systems just as well and should be a self contained
> package.
Err, are you meaning you want to add the translation of all package
descriptions in the source deb of dpkg ? I think I misunderstood one more
time...
Each package outside of debian can put a po file in
/usr/share/dpkg/description/LANG or whatever, and call the to-be-written
tool update-descriptions, which (will) merge all such files in only one mo
file.
For packages inside Debian, I don't think it's a nice idea to ask the
maintainer to re-upload the source pkg each time the translation change.
Experience shows it's quite a bad idea (see my others mails in the thread on
-devel).
> I'm also not very happy with using a completely different format file
> to store the translations in.
Err, one more time, I don't understand your rant. the po file is *the*
format file for translations, and even dpkg use it. The actual trend is to
use this format even for other material than program messages. See the move
in the LDP project to use the KDE tools which allow to extract the part to
translate from a DocBook file to a po file. Or the gnome-i18n-tools, which
can extract part of XML files to po files, also (even if not directly). Or,
nearer, the doc/menu-translate file from the menu source archive, which
states that the menu maintainer plans to do the same thing that we proposed
for .deb descriptions (with mo files and so on).
But maybe you mean you want to add the translation to the control file, and
patch dpkg to use that ? (Almost) fine. Only almost because this solution
implies to reupload the whole package each time the translation is updated,
and implies that the translator have to wait for the maintainer to do that
before its work gets usable. Look at the cited file from the menu package
for a good rational against this solution. It would also be bad (IMHO, of
course), because you will have to reinvent the wheel concerning obsolete
translations, like debconf have to do concerning its templates. Why not to
use the standard tools ?
You're the boss concerning dpkg, but if you don't want of translated
descriptions, you will have to explain why, don't you ?
Bye, Mt.
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