RFC: policy for translated docs (was Re: policy for translated manpages for section 1 ?)

[Enrique Zanardi <ezanardi@noah.dfis.ull.es>]

Proposed policy (for future Debian releases >= 2.1 ):

If translated documentation for a package foo is available, it should be
included in that package, not in a general package for translated
documentation (Example: Section 1 man pages in manpages-<LANG> packages. 
They should be included in the relevant packages).

If the translated documentation and messages in package foo_<V>-<R>.deb
exceeds NNN KB [... What's a reasonable value for NNN? ...] extract it 
to architecture-independent sub-packages foo-<LANG>_<V>-<R>.deb that 
Depends: foo (= <V>-<R>), Provides: foo-translated-docs_<V>-<R>
[... versioned Provides! dpkg must handle that! ...]
and make foo_<V>-<R>.deb Suggests: foo-translated-docs (= <V>-<R>) 

Package management frontends should be extended to hide
foo-<LANG>_<V>-<R>.deb from the packages list [... as was suggested for
libraries in Deity ...]

-- 
Enrique Zanardi						   ezanardi@ull.es
Dpto. Fisica Fundamental y Experimental			Univ. de La Laguna