i18n of tasksel (and cdebconf)
Hi,
I would like to supply Japanese translation (po files) for tasksel.
However, it is already reported [1] that tasksel has problems on
handling of multibyte and multicolumn characters like Japanese. Thus,
addition of Japanese translation may cause Mojibake [2].
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-i18n/2003/debian-i18n-200308/msg00020.html
[2] http://www.debian.or.jp/~kubota/mojibake/
I am now coping with this problem. I found that tasksel works well
with the following two modifications:
(1) Use slang1a-utf8/slang1-utf8-dev instead of slang1/slang1-dev.
This enables displaying multibyte/multicolumn characters, not
only UTF-8 but also various encodings such as EUC-JP. Of course
simple 8bit encodings such as ISO-8859-15 are also supported.
(2) I wrote a library "libtextwrap" [3] and its Debian packages
(libtextwrap1 and libtextwrap-dev). Use it for text-wrapping
(in other words, line-folding). It supports multibyte encodings,
mulitcolumn (or fullwidth) characters, combining characters, and
languages which don't use whitespaces between words (you know,
ordinary line-folding algorithm depends on an assumption that
words are separated by whitespaces, which is not valid for Chinese
and Japanese). I uploaded the Debian package (initial upload)
two days ago and it is not available for Sid yet.
[3] http://libtextwrap.sourceforge.net/
I can supply a patch for tasksel because I have already tested it,
but there seem some (possible) problems on this solution:
A possible problem around (1) is that slang1 is "Priority: required"
and "Section: base" while slang1a-utf8 is "Priority: standard" and
"Section: libs". I don't know whether tasksel's depending on
slang1a-utf8 affects this situation.
A problem around (2) is that Debian packages of libtextwrap1 and
libtextwrap-dev will need about 10 days to be installed into Sid,
because it is the initial upload. I think this library is stable
enough because it is simple, small, and a port of libtext-wrapi18n-perl
which debconf-i18n depends on. Do we have enough time to wait for
the libtextwrap1/libtextwrap-dev packages while we are starting
release process for Sarge? If no, tasksel can use libtextwrap's
source code directly.
As written in the mail [1], cdebconf has the same problem, though
I have not tested yet. (I found that cdebconf seems not to support
templates generated by po-debconf.) Since debconf templates are
*already* translated for various packages which are available in
Sarge/Sid, cdebconf will have to support displaying these translations
if it will be used for installer for Sarge. Otherwise cdebconf will
have to disable translation.
Any comments?
---
Tomohiro KUBOTA <kubota@debian.org>
http://www.debian.or.jp/~kubota/
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