Re: Bug#512210: lintian: [checks/po-debconf] Extend template check for updated strings

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org>]

On Mon, Jan 19, 2009 at 04:15:21PM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Neil Williams <codehelp@debian.org> writes:
> > OK, I think there is a way of identifying private templates. It could be
> > as simple as agreeing (after Lenny) that a particular Description is
> > uniformly used for all private templates. That would help translators
> > too.
> 
> Well, it shouldn't help translators because those templates should not be
> marked as translatable anyway.  It would just be an additional requirement
> that we're adding for people writing debconf templates so that they don't
> get Lintian warnings.

If you implement this check, please make it inactive for udebs. We
already have a comprehensive and semi-automatic translation
infrastructure, and concerns about questions asked on upgrade don't
apply to the installer.

In general the installer *does* use debconf as a registry, and this is
sanctioned. The assumptions in this bug do not generally hold for it.

> > Most already seem to use "for internal use". After all, the description
> > itself is completely arbitrary as far as internal templates are
> > concerned.
> 
> Some examples of untranslated templates that don't use that string are:
> 
>     cdebootstrap (a udeb special case)
>     cpufrequtils
>     etcinsvk
>     kickseed (maybe an actual bug)

kickseed is like that because it's asking user-visible questions before
the language question has been asked; this is a consequence of the
design of Kickstart and not something it's reasonably possible to do
anything about. Adding "for internal use" would be inappropriate.

>     lowmem

lowmem also knows what it's doing, with this comment above the relevant
templates:

  # Note: not translatable, runs before language is chosen

I've added matching comments to kickseed.

> Many of them use variations on it.  Those are just the ones that I can
> find because they don't use po-debconf at all and hence Lintian currently
> warns (but won't after I fix #492626).
> 
> Looking in more depth, while Lintian currently uses the internal use part
> to suppress checks for grammar and the like, there is currently no check
> in Lintian for a template that isn't marked as translatable but should be.
> I think we therefore have no idea how many false positives we're likely to
> uncover.  We could introduce this as experimental first and see what
> lintian.d.o digs up, though.
> 
> -- 
> Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
> 
> 
> 

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson@debian.org]