Re: Common set of debconf templates (was: Re: RFC: best practice creating database)
(crossposted to -devel and -i18n...feel free to followup on the
appropriate place...it probably belongs to both currently)
Quoting Andreas Tille (tillea@rki.de):
> On Fri, 8 Oct 2004, Christian Perrier wrote:
>
> >All such templates should probably go into a common set of debconf
> >templates, provided by a very small package, which all these packages
> >should depend upon, instead of constantly reinvent the wheel....and
> >make up, translators, do damn boring work.
> IMHO this is a brilliant idea but I doubt that it would be realized if
> noone of the translators team would start building this package. You
> people seem to have the best knowledge of it and thus I would start
> providing such a package and start filing wishlist bug reports against
> the relevant packages.
>
> [Feel free to quote me anywhere, but I wanted to avoid ACK-messages ...]
Indeed, this is a long time since I think about such "common debconf
templates" package.
So, your remark about translators is probably a very good one.:-)
The only problem is that I'm damn unable to find a 25th hour in the
day for working on this.
Would any of the i18n people start working on such a package ?
Let me resume the situation shortly:
Several packages use some kind of very usual debconf templates for
prompting about common things. For instance, most packages creating a
database in a RDBMS ask for:
-Database server hostname
-Database server port
-Database name
-Database owner username (sometimes called "Database user")
and so on...
I imagined that a very small package named "debconf-rdbms" could
include common templates for this. Then packages needing such
templates can just Depend on it (or Pre-Depend, I'm not sure) and use
db_register and similar stuff for using the common template for
prompting...
This would save us translators a lot of boring task translating always
the same things. This would also save some space in /var/lib/dpkg/info
as templates would not be replicated with their translations.
Several other parts could also benefit from this...which would need
creating a few debconf-whatever packages...
The current way of handling common templates by the use of shared/* is
not optimal ATM, as all packages using shared/* templates must define
them. They must have the same text...but nothing enforces this...and
there is no mechanism for reusing the translations which are
replicated many times.
So, all this is just a matter of creating a first preliminary very
small package targeted at database stuff. Just start with one question
and, in the same time, work with a package which could make use of it.
This could be used as a live demo and then be generalized among other
packages using and creating a database during their configuration.
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