On Thu, Sep 13, 2001 at 02:35:46PM +0200, Wichert Akkerman wrote: > Previously Martin Quinson wrote: > > But if you put the translation in the control file, you have to add almost > > hundred fields, on per locale: Description-fr ; Description-fr_FR ; > > Description-fr_CA ; Description-fr_BE just to have the more used french > > variants (and no, it would not be acceptable to merge all country variant of > > the language in the language. Think about pt_BR and pt_PT). > > Bogus. If you buy wordperfect does it have 96 different translations > in it? Of course not, they only put in a few important ones.
If I buy Word, there is only one language in it. Mine. Is it the way to go ? I agree with the fact we should select the 'most important language'. I just wanted to point out that this approach does not scale *at all*. > > Would we declare one new field in <dpkg>/lib/parse.c:fieldinfo for each one, > > choose the most used one, have a new kind of 'variable field', designating > > the Description, allowing a parameter designing the language used ? > > Please let go of the idea that dpkg should keep a list of all descriptions > in memory, that is simply not reasonable. In fact forget about dpkg internals > completely, they are completely irrelevant to this discussion. Should I understand 'keep away from dpkg' ? Of course dpkg does not have to keep all language in memory. But to update the status files, it has to parse it and write it, don't it ? > > Should we make two files, like status-essential and status-extra, or split > > it further ? Moreover, what should be the format of the new file(s) ? Also > > rfc822-complient, or something else ? > > Does it really matter? It depends on if you plan to acctually implement it one day... Bye, Mt.