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Re: Why isn't apt internationalized?



On 21.12.01 at 22:17:00 Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> No one has made a complete and correct patch to do this. All the ones you
> pointed to miss significant things - like the shared libraries and
> autoconf.

Hello Jason,

Does that mean that if you get a patch which satisfies your needs you'd
be willing to include it quickly? That would be nice. Let me utter a few
thoughts, nothing particularly well thought-through:

- The most important thing to have have translated messages in the apt
  suite is apt-get; this is what almost everyone will face quite often.
- In a reasonable well-behaved environment it is very easy to make a
  program use translated messages; in Debian, the C library offers a
  known-to-be-good gettext implementation.
This means that for a Debian apt package, a patch of about four lines
will suffice to bring apt-get to use translations. I could even imagine
some kind of apt-i18n package providing a translated apt for the time
until apt has such support fully in itself; but of course such a fork
would be a bad thing.

Question is: What expectations do you have to accept a patch? The (quite
simple, actually) patch I have hacked up does the following:
- Makes all command line utilities use translations,
- Employs autoconf to find gettext.
Unfortunately apt doesn't use automake; not that I like automake, but
using it makes the inclusion of gettext very simple, as all gettext
documentation relies on that. I haven't quite gotten the hang of the apt
build system, I'm afraid.

I'm eager to contribute, as I'd very much like to see a translated apt
happen. Bye,
    Mike

-- 
|=| Michael Piefel                    piefel@informatik.hu-berlin.de
|=| Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin              http://www.piefel.de
|=| Tel. (+49 30) 2093 3831



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