Yet another idea popping up in my mind. I'm in a lintian mood today..:)
Some debconf templates use variable substitution (along with debconf's
SUBST command) to incorporate context-variable text in debconf
templates.
Description: Do you want to erase disk ${DISK}?
Blah blah blah
Translators MUST keep these variables unchanged in their translation
and a very common mistake is translating them. French example:
"Voulez-vous effacer le disque ${DISQUE}?"
The result will be the variable popping up untranslated which is very
disturbing and confusing for users (particularly in that case!).
In D-I "spellchecker", we added such check for "bad variable
substitution" and it catched many such errors.
I'm sorry for not being technically able to provide the appropriate
patch to lintian for this but that could deserve some attention.
The lintian error message (this is an error, imho) should instruct the
package maintainer to contact the translator listed in
"Last-Translator:" in order to have him|her correct this mistake.
Thoughts? I voluntarily didn't report this as a wishlist bug against
lintian because it needs some initial discussion, probably.
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