dselect and i18n (Re: bigger, sexier, more phly debian...)

[Karl Eichwalder <ke@ke.Central.DE>]

[bruce@pixar.com (Bruce Perens)]

Please excuse my absence for some months -- perhaps I have missed the
progress in the direction of `i18n' (internationalization).  I do not
want discuss here, whether program messages in the user's native
language are senseless or not senseless...

|   That and other dselect enhancements won't happen unless someone
|   volunteers to write them.

I am wondering whether someone has started to `i18n' Debian packages
somewhere; for an C programmer it shouldn't be too difficult to add
`i18n' support using the GNU gettext library (I have done it for GNU
hello: ftp.gwdg.de:/pub/gnu2/i18n/pre-test/hello-1.3.4.tar.gz, I hope
I got the directory right).

Several GNU programs already have i18n (gettext, sharutils, clisp),
others will follow next time (tar, recode, sh-utils, fileutils,
textutils, hello, ...).  Two things are needed now for Debian:

    We need to `i18n' Linux packages like `mount', `procps', and the
    install tools (`dselect', `dpkg').

    And we need to `i18n' the socalled user applications (`tin', `slrn',
    `fvwm', `chimera', etc.).

I would like to volunteer in that area, but my C skills are limited...
and my english as well.  I guess the authors of all these nice tools and
programs would add i18n, if they would know that there is this great
gettext package (thanks to Ulrich Drepper!).

Karl