Re: translations...
On Fri, Aug 30, 2002 at 11:13:11AM -0500, Adam Heath wrote:
> On Fri, 30 Aug 2002, Martin Quinson wrote:
>
> > [snip]
>
> I won't discuss the details of your message, but here are some generic ideas I
> have been playing with that will help your situation.
Here is a short summary about the issues we should face (IMHO) to handle
translated descriptions in dpkg:
1) How are handled translations in the source package?
2) How are stored the translations in the binary package?
3) How are stored the translations on the user machine?
4) How do dpkg handle the translation?
> I have recently been doing lots of memory reduction tweaks to dpkg.
> Currently, dpkg-query -S dpkg takes 48% less memory in my work dir, then the
> one in /usr/bin.
>
> While, that doesn't immediately help you, I have thought about making
> description fields handled specially. Instead of dpkg storing the text of the
> description field in memory, it would store a reference to a file, and
> start/stop offsets. In the dpkg-query -S case, this would 430k. In the
> dpkg-query -l case, it'd said 4.6m.
>
> Because of this large mem savings, it may well be worth doing. Once that is
> done, it's relativly easy to have alternate descriptions made available, and
> very little cost.
All this sounds pretty interesting, and I think this would solve the 3)
issue and help a lot in solving the 4) one. I'm quite curious about how you
will update the file containing all descriptions efficiently, but I guess
you already thought about that.
For the 2), I guess dpkg will have to accept as many Description-$lang:
fields as languages to be supported, or we will have to handle those fields
in a generic manner. What do you think about it?
For the 1), it may be a bit early to think about that, but I guess that this
would be handled natively by the next source package format I've often heard
about. But as I said, it may be a bit early, and moreover, I've no idea.
Please make sure to report here your progress about this new way of handling
descriptions. And if I can help you in any way (testing, documenting, ...),
just drop me a mail.
Bye, Mt.
--
Of course Pacman didn't influence us as kids. If it did, we'd be running
around in darkened rooms, popping pills and listening to repetitive music.
Reply to: