On Wed, Aug 24, 2005 at 01:43:37AM +0200, Martin Quinson wrote: > Hello, > > a while ago, someone (Denis?) raised a major issue in my designs and dreams > of a central po files collection in debian. > > Let's imagine that upstream distribute a fr.po file, but it's suboptimal. It > gets fixed (or completed) internally in debian, and everything is great and > such. > > But how to deal with a new upstream release? Dropping the upstream po file > is very impolite with upstream translators. Moreover, they may have improved > in the meanwhile. Dropping the debian translation is a bit suicidal. From my POV, and my experience working upstream, people that want to translate po files from upstream should work with upstream directly. It is very common (when the above is not done) that a new upstream release provides a new po which breaks the previous one and makes the translator's work useless (that happened to me with Gaim). Or, even, a different translator approaches upstream after it a different version has been translated in Debian and upstream has to decide to either use the outdated version from Debian or the updated one from this "new guy". With the bad side effect that some "free" translators that approach upstream directly are not involved in translation teams (they might use the program, and do their first translation ever because they like it) and their translations are sub-optimal and have not been reviewed. So, again, if the po is not Debian-specific, translators should better coordinate with upstream so that their translations will eventually make it into Debian (with a new upstream release). If either no new upstream release is made or the translator wants to have the Debian translation up to date too he can, based on his work done upstream, msgmerge his po with the Debian sources and submit a bug to the Debian BTS. That way the Debian package translation can be updated regardless of whether it is upgraded to the latest upstream version. Of course, the above only applies if upstream is still alive and "outside" Debian. If the package has been forked or upstream = Debian then the translations can be hangled only internally and submitted to the BTS following the same procedure we use for po-debconf files. Notice, however, that even with forked packages, many distributions might carry them so if the translations are shared between them it might avoid duplicate efforts. I.e. I have seen translations done in Debian and distributed in the Debian package that have been later re-done in other distributions (like Mandrake), as a consequence, effort is duplicated and the use of a given tool is not consistent across distributions. My 2c. Regards Javier
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