Re: language for changelog
Hey guys!
Next time when you are discussing the packages that I maintain, could you CC
me a copy too please? I am not reading debian-policy all the time, and I
do not like my packages being discussed behind my back. (Just like how
Brandon felt when the X11 R6.4 issue was discussed and yet no one notified
him to look at debian-private)
(I felt left out... *sob*...) <grin, duck, run>...
Yes, I already wrote a summary of the changes in English. I don't quite
understand what the exact changes were, so I couldn't quite translate it.
Nonetheless, I have already explained the gists of what I understand in
English: Updates/minor bug fixes to xcin/tsin.c, the Tsi yin (Phonetic
phrase input method) module. I don't know enough technical details of the
inner workings to translate the original Chinese words.
On Sun, Apr 19, 1998 at 10:52:11PM +0200, Christian Schwarz wrote:
>
> I second Joey's request that changelog files should be written in
> English--even if the package is useful for other languages too.
I did the best I could. It is not pure-English; it is bi-lingual. The
details in Chinese, summary in English. Someone more well-versed in the
technical details of XCIN could try to translate the changelog into English,
but I intend to keep the Chinese words to avoid confusion or loss of
details, especially when I don't fully understand it.
> (Just consider a Debian system where lots of different peoples have
> accounts--like master.debian.org. AFAIK, none of our admins know Chinese,
> but perhaps a few users want those Chinese support packages. If the admin
> is carefully, he'll check the changelog files before upgrading the
> packages...)
There are also *lots* of Chinese people who use XCIN but know little
English. If you want Debian to be a "Universal" Operating System, you can't
dictate the "English" is the ultimate superior language alone. However, I do
agree that we should try our very best to provide both English and the local
language.
> BTW, the same should apply to copyright files: I just noticed that the
> copyright file of the selfhtml package (a german online book about HTML)
> is written in German only. I'd consider this as a bug, but before I file a
> bug report I wanted to discuss this here.
>
> In summary, I'd propose the following policy:
>
> ``The Debian changelog and the copyright files of a package must be
> written in English. If the original license is written in a non-English
> language, that original version must be included in the package as well,
> together with a translation into English.''
>
> Comments or objections?
s/must be written in English/must be written in English, and the
original wording (?) in the original language should be provided in
case of confusion or if the maintainer cannot fully understand or
translate.... Okay, you get my point. Please fix up my English. :-)/
s/license/license or document/
Also, *indicate the character set*!! For example, in my xcin changelog
files, I have indicated the strange codes are in Chinese big5 code format.
Other codings include ISO-8859-[1-9], KOI-8 (?), Chinese GuoBiao (GB) code,
ISO-2022-JP/ZH/KR, Unicode (UTF-7, UTF-8, etc.), and so forth.
Thanks,
Anthony
--
Anthony Fok Tung-Ling Civil and Environmental Engineering
foka@gpu.srv.ualberta.ca University of Alberta, Canada
anthony_fok@catholic.org Keep smiling! *^_^*
Come visit Our Lady of Victory Camp -- http://olvc.home.ml.org/
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