Re: Debian Debconf Translation proposal ( again )
Jacob Sparre Andersen writes:
> Dominique Devriese wrote:
>> CURRENT KDE SYSTEM
> [...]
>> A user only installs one translation package ( for his language of
>> course ) ( or more if he wants more languages, of course ).
>> PROPOSED DEBIAN SYSTEM
> [...]
>> 2. The translators don't try to get their work
>> included in Debian packages. Instead they provide one package of
>> their own, that they can occasionally release in sid if they want
>> to.
> Even though it would be a rather large change in the infrastructure,
> I would prefer if there was one localization package for each locale
> for each ordinary internationalized package. So like there are
> binary packages specific to the various platforms, there should be
> l10n packages for the various locales. It would mean that `apt-get`
> would have to be modified to automatically download and install the
> appropriate (selected by the system administrator) l10n package
> whenever and application package is installed.
I disagree with this suggestion. IMHO, it would be best to provide
one large translations package per language. Arguments are
1. Your arguments don't hold ;p See below.
2. It is a lot less work.
3. Your suggestion doesn't achieve the reduction of work for the
translators, which is the intention of this proposal.
> The benefits of this system of decoupling localisation data for
> different application packages are decoupled from each other are:
> 1) You only have to have localisation data installed for
> the packages you have installed.
This is true. However, given the pretty small amount of translatable
template's in (almost ?) all Debian packages, this is a minor
advantage.
> 2) You can have appropriate localisation data installed
> even if you use a different combination of versions of
> application packages than what the translators did.
I disagree with this. Translations should be collected per-release.
There has to be a set of translations that are as complete as possible
for every stable release, along with a string freeze to cater for
that. In addition, translation teams can optionally provide the same
for unstable, if they think it's worth the trouble to track a moving
target. Perhaps it's possible to version the translations to allow
for people with packages mixed from several releases.
cheers
domi
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