On Wed, Aug 08, 2001 at 07:37:19PM +0200, Radovan Garabik wrote:
> The situation with localized debian is improving all the time,
> and soon it will be possible to have the installation completely
> in one's national language.
btw: I have test the debian demo cd from the linuxtag in germany (I
master this cd myself). This cd use the german potato
bootfloppies with woody packages. And the installation was nice.
IMHO >80 % of all bootfloppy and debconf questions are in german.
Nice. really nice.
> There are two major fields required to be translated:
> debconf templates and Packages file (= Description in debian/control)
>
> These two fields have very similar position, and having a unified way of
> handling translations could be beneficial.
>
> Currently, debconf templates translations are handled by bugging
> individual maintainers (by filling wishlist bugs) to include them
> in their packages.
>
> Translators of Packages file have taken other approach (possibly because
> there is no other infrastructure for handling localized Packages, unlike
> debconf): there is a central database with translated Descriptions,
> updated by translating teams, and individual maintainers have nothing in
> common with this.
all right at this point.
> Clearly, both these aproaches have their advantages and disadvantages:
> debconf way's advantage is that maintainer is in control and if he
> understands the translation at least a bit, he can spot mistakes and
> translator's misunderstandings (happened to me).
> With centralized Packages files, maintainer is out of the way.
disaccord:
- the maintainer don't have really controll of the translated debconf
templates. He don't speaking >3 languages and he can only get the
templates and include this or not.
- He delay only the translation without any improvement.
- a maintainer is not out of the way with centralized translations.
He can translated this own Packages and add his languages in the
central database.
> In my opinion, Packages could be handled via the following way:
> Description-lang could be added to debian/control by an individual
> maintainer - presumably this will be used for languages the
> maintainer speaks, and feels competent to write the description in.
no, I don't like this.
This is only a delay.
We don't need the maintainer, we must only waiting. With the central
db, the translated description are useable with the next day.
(the ftp maintainer has the override file with a reason, they don't
(and can't) wait on the package maintainer)
See http://auric.debian.org/~grisu/debian_translation/ and see all the
bugreports.
german as a example:
- we have 353 packages with debconf templates files
- we have 265 packages with translated templates files or with
bugreports with a translated templates files (75%)
- only 212 packages have include the translated files now. (60%)
You see the delay.
Only some packages have debconf templates (<6%) and with this is a
decentral view ok. But Description have every Package.
On the debconf page are >20 languages. With this we have in every
package >20 translated Description, The Package file is now > 5MB big,
2.5 MB (and morei) are only for the descriptions of one language. With
20 translated decription in one file, the package file is >50 MB big.
If someone found a spelling error, you must upload the whole package,
not only the descriprtion, alle auto builder catch the package and
make also a upload. If the maintainer change the description, and make
a upload for every translation, he make 20 uploads only for the
description (worst case) and with the auto builder ...
Stop, this is not nice.
I see no pros, but many cons with a decentral translation.
> As for debconf templates, they would benefit from centralized
> database too, but unfortunately they _have to_ be present in a
> package, so I see no clear way of improving current situation.
If we have a centralized database for the debconf templates, the live
of the translators whould be easier. But we don't have it, and we must
play this game without it.
Gruss
Grisu
--
Michael Bramer - a Debian Linux Developer http://www.debian.org
PGP: finger grisu@db.debian.org -- Linux Sysadmin -- Use Debian Linux
"Verwende Perl. Shell will man koennen, dann aber nicht verwenden."
Kristian Koehntopp, de.comp.os.unix.misc
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