Quoting Camm Maguire (camm@enhanced.com):
> Greetings, and thanks so much for your work here!
>
> As I understand your proposal, I do object, so please abort, at least
> temporarily, so we can consult upon the best course forward. I have
> already consulted the opinion of many atlas users, and the 'annoying
> note opinion' is far from universally held. Please also note the
> currently reduced priority of the notes. This said, I might be
> persuaded that some or even all of the content belongs in
> README.Debian. What I object to is basing this assessment on the
> opinion of those submitting bugs, and not the vast silent majority who
> appear to like things the way they are.
Well, the announced NMU mixed indeed two topics, both of which being
currently the subject of active actions by the i18n task force:
-the multiplication of notes displayed by debconf
-the proposed translations for *all* these notes, which are slowly
being forgotten in the BTS
Both are of course mixed: if notes are finally removed, entirely or
partly, the translations are partly obsoleted.
Both have something in common: the complete lack of visible maintainer
activity in the BTS.
About debconf notes, all arguments that you raised could have been
sent to the bug reports such as #235732...or the recent ones which I
automatically raised during the mass bug filing about "useless" notes.
Some of the translations are sitting in the BTS for about 1.5 years
without any comment.
*this* is the initial point of this action: get some reaction about
this. The minimal one would be an upload with all these translations
fixed.
But, please, let me argue again about the notes. They are VERY
verbose, they give technical details about the implementation which
mostly ALL other packages in Debian put in README.Debian to avoid
interrupting installations.
But, moreover, as they use low priority, they are indeed NOT seen by
probably 90 or 95% of your users. So, as such, they *are* useless. I
suggest that you go through the details of the rationale given in the
recent bug reports I sent: I couldn't develop better.
Please taken into account that the current maintainer of debconf (Joey
Hess) himself thinks that low and medium priority notes fall under a
contradiction and considers completely removing the support for notes.
My proposal is to remove all the notes but the ones that are displayed
when certain conditions on CPU's are not met.
For instance:
#!/bin/sh
TDNCOMP=y
. /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
if ! grep ^flags /proc/cpuinfo | grep -q 3dnow; then
db_input high atlas3-3dnow/no_3dnow
fi
db_go
These "no_*" notes become *error* templates type which is perfectly
acceptable.
Finally, please also note that some of the templates are not listed in
debian/po/POTFILES.in which makes them untranslatable and please also
remember about the bug suggesting to run debconf-updatepo in the clean
target.
I still intent to work on a patch combining all these proposals, which
should reduce the ammount of debconf stuff in atlas3 to an acceptable
level. The corresponding patch will be sent to the BTS in #235732.
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