Re: Status of the shadow package
On Fri, Jun 04, 2004 at 01:29:19PM -0400, kcr@debian.org wrote:
> [Actually, this has been causing me to conclude that we probably need a
> mechanism whereby translators can cause new translations to appear
> outside of the structure of the "package" itself.
This seems to me like an interesting idea considering a debian-l10n
framework. It would be interesting to see some script called update-l10n
(just like update-flashplugin and update-msttcorefonts), which would
fetch the updated translations. I see following improvements:
- Translations are not a part of the package anymore, so they can be a)
worked on and b) released independently
- The system could get more and more translated, even a stable one -
imagine a computer class somewhere in India, which runs stable, has been
completely English at the moment of installation and gets more and more
translated after some Hindi translators have been found.
- We will have no l10n-uploads anymore - I'm sitting on a 2 MBit/s
DSL-channel and I'm sometimes really pissed off by my daily sid update
logs, which tell me that some 10-MiB package has been only downloaded to
update some debconf templates for the languages I never use anyway.
- Flexibility considering installed languages - I can choose the languages
I want (/me thinks of kde-i18n-* - NO, I DO NOT want *such* bundled
packages, it must be more flexible).
Drawbacks I see at the moment (Christian will most probably see thousands
more ;)):
- Organization. This method would presume that all translations are
handled in the same way, most probably with some kind of big database of
strings (I have some ideas for this database which I'll post later on,
so it's not really a drawback to me ;))
- Distribution: how do we distribute "initial" translations (e.g. on a CD)
and how do we update them effectively? What if no net access is given?
(solvable)
- If we integrate upstream templates (i.e. program translations), how do
we synchronise with upstream? (tricky)
--
Nikolai Prokoschenko
nikolai@prokoschenko.de / Jabber: pronik@jabber.org
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