Proposal for the norwegian bokmål langcode transition for po-debconf

[Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com>]

At the moment, Norwegian Bokmål uses two language codes in their
translation.  The traditional, no_NO, and the new and more correct one
nb_NO.  Support for the new one was added to GNU libc a few months
ago, and it will be included in Debian Sarge.

It will take a while before most users replaces their old locale
setting with the new one, and until that happen, I believe it is
sensible to provide translations using both the old and the new
language code.  But it is also sensible to only store the translation
once in the source, to avoid having to maintain two files, and remove
the possibility for the two to get out of sync with each other.

I have a suggestion for a solution that handle both of these issues
for the packages using po-debconf to store their debconf translations.
I suggest storing the translation using the nb.po name, and copying it
to no.po at build time to make sure po-debconf find and use it.

I've already implemented it in base-config.  The changes needed was
simple.  Add this code to the 'clean' target in debian/rules to make
sure the source package only have the nb.po file:

  # Remove transition copy while we wait for all users to change from
  # no_NO to nb_NO [pere 2004-02-27]
  $(RM) debian/po/no.po

And then add this code just before the template file is generated in
the 'binary-arch' or 'binary-indep' target, typically with a call to
dh_installdebconf:

  # Make transition copy while we wait for all users to change from
  # no_NO to nb_NO [pere 2004-02-27]
  cp debian/po/nb.po debian/po/no.po

It might be a better idea to modify the implementation of po-debconf
to do this work automatically.  It could always use the nb.po file to
generate both the 'nb' and the 'no' translations, and warn if both
nb.po and no.po (or nb_NO.po and no_NO.po) files are present.  This
way, the source of the debian packages do not need to change, and only
the build-dependencies need to be updated.  I copy this email to the
po-debconf maintainer to get his view on this idea.