Since a quite long time, the Debian Installer translation framework (http://d-i.alioth.debian.org/l10n-stats) includes in so-called levels 3 to 5, translation from packages that are not directly part of the installer itself. These packages or software were chosen because some of their localizable strings could appear somewhere during the installation process. Sometimes as fugitive messages on the screen (dpkg has such strings as well as apt)...or during some type of installs (xorg or samba have been in such situation) This is becoming less true these days and keeping those "levels" was mostly because of some conservatism from my side during the lenny release cycle than motivated by a real need. Of course, that has some nice effects, by bringing more localization to these packages/software than they would have if just being handled the "natural" way. However, that requires more monitoring work of the statistics scripts for me...and naming these levels "Debian Installer translations" is more confusing than anything. *Real* Debian Installer translations are what's in "level 1" (itself but into 5 "sublevels"). To some extent, what we have included in level 3 also is part of "Debian Installer translations" because these strings are used directly by Debian Installer packages, or the Debian Installer processes (popcon, iso-codes, tasksel, etc.) As a consequence, I have the intent to soon reduce the number of levels listed as "Debian Installer translation levels" to only 2. It does not mean that packages listed in other levels will no longer be localized. If course they will and, of course, it will still be OK to update/add translations for them. However, translators will have to do this on their own, by using the existing infrastructure for debconf and programs translations (http://www.debian.org/intl/l10n/). That can be seen as a regression in some way but I would more call it a refocus. Meanwhile, work is done to make access to debconf and Debian native programs l10n material easier (all debconf translations are currently synced into our Pootle server and we only need to find the best way to push them back to packages....once done, the same could be done for native Debian packages' l10n material). Of course, existing l10n documentation will be updated accordingly. --
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature