[D-I] Etch Debian Installer beta 1 released: i18n facts
As some of you (i18n people) may have seem, the beta 1 release of the
Debian Installer for Etch has been announced:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2005/11/msg00008.html
Please do NOT regard this as a beta version of the Debian distribution
itself. This is a beta version of the *installer* only. There are
never beta versions of Debian.
Summary of facts regarding i18n:
--------------------------------
-We now officially support 51 languages including English, plus 3
languages which we support only in the alpha "graphical" installer
Vietnamese is not mentioned in the official announcement because
2nd stage is completely unreadable due to a localechooser bug
which was discovered too late. It is "supported", though.
Some languages (Belarusian, Greek, Welsh, Wolof, Kurdish) have
various "minor" problems in 2nd stage.
This denotes a poor testing of localized installations. Translators,
please take care of following the development a bit closer and TEST
Debian Installer with your translations. You can easily test netinst
images in a qemu virtual machine. Even if slow, this is usually
enough to get a rough idea of whether the installation is broken or
not.
Most of the problems are now with 2nd stage display quirks.
-We have quite "low" completeness statistics
See http://people.debian.org/~seppy/d-i/translation-status.html for details.
This was expected, more or less. No string freeze happened during
this release and some string changes happened even in the last days.
As a consequence, most languages are considered "nearly complete".
Moreover, the "real" situation is less good than described in status
pages as a few packages had string changes and were never re-uploaded
later. So barely ALL localized installs using etch beta 1 installer
will show English screens here or there.
Level 2 to 5 concern packages which are often under heavy development
so statistics don't mean much here
I'm not worried about many of the languages. I'm however worried about
languages which didn't have A SINGLE UPDATE since sarge release:
Estonian, Albanese, Traditional Chinese, Slovenian, Finnish (IIRC,
deliberate choice by translator, though), Croatian, Welsh, Hungarian,
Malagasy, Latvian, Belarusian
I still wait for an "I'm alive" sign from most of these translators
(Tapio, yes FI is OK...:-)))
-We now have a solid i18n base
There were few unexpected breakings in i18n/l10n during this
development process. Most often, when D-I was not broken by something
else, localized installs worked flawlessly.
-The switch to UTF-8 can happen for Latin languages
I switch French to default UTF-8 in the early development stages and
up to now I found no bad quirks.
I think we're now ready to switch all Latin-* languages to UTF-8 and
will probably do so as soon as possible.
Input from the keyboard at the console will then need to be carefully
tested. This is most of the time the hardest thing to achieve properly.
The situation may be more difficult with cyrillic languages. I expect
more contribution on that matter from the translators of these languages.
Nearly all other languages are already using UTF-8 by default.
Congratulations to all translators involved in D-I
localization. You're doing a tremendous job....so tremendous that I
often have hard times following you, people.
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