At the moment, Norwegian Bokm�l uses two language codes in their translation. The traditional, no_NO, and the new and more correct one nb_NO. Support for the new one was added to GNU libc a few months ago, and it will be included in Debian Sarge.
It will take a while before most users replaces their old locale setting with the new one, and until that happen, I believe it is sensible to provide translations using both the old and the new language code. But it is also sensible to only store the translation once in the source, to avoid having to maintain two files, and remove the possibility for the two to get out of sync with each other. I have a suggestion for a solution that handle both of these issues for the packages using po-debconf to store their debconf translations. I suggest storing the translation using the nb.po name, and copying it to no.po at build time to make sure po-debconf find and use it. I've already implemented it in base-config. The changes needed was simple. Add this code to the 'clean' target in debian/rules to make sure the source package only have the nb.po file: # Remove transition copy while we wait for all users to change from # no_NO to nb_NO [pere 2004-02-27] $(RM) debian/po/no.po And then add this code just before the template file is generated in the 'binary-arch' or 'binary-indep' target, typically with a call to dh_installdebconf: # Make transition copy while we wait for all users to change from # no_NO to nb_NO [pere 2004-02-27] cp debian/po/nb.po debian/po/no.po It might be a better idea to modify the implementation of po-debconf to do this work automatically. It could always use the nb.po file to generate both the 'nb' and the 'no' translations, and warn if both nb.po and no.po (or nb_NO.po and no_NO.po) files are present. This way, the source of the debian packages do not need to change, and only the build-dependencies need to be updated. I copy this email to the po-debconf maintainer to get his view on this idea.
