The situation with localized debian is improving all the time, and soon it will be possible to have the installation completely in one's national language. There are two major fields required to be translated: debconf templates and Packages file (= Description in debian/control)
These two fields have very similar position, and having a unified way of handling translations could be beneficial. Currently, debconf templates translations are handled by bugging individual maintainers (by filling wishlist bugs) to include them in their packages. Translators of Packages file have taken other approach (possibly because there is no other infrastructure for handling localized Packages, unlike debconf): there is a central database with translated Descriptions, updated by translating teams, and individual maintainers have nothing in common with this. Clearly, both these aproaches have their advantages and disadvantages: debconf way's advantage is that maintainer is in control and if he understands the translation at least a bit, he can spot mistakes and translator's misunderstandings (happened to me). With centralized Packages files, maintainer is out of the way. In my opinion, Packages could be handled via the following way: Description-lang could be added to debian/control by an individual maintainer - presumably this will be used for languages the maintainer speaks, and feels competent to write the description in. Translating team then translates only those descriptions not having the translation for the language in question. For packages having the description in target language, they just take Description-lang verbatim (+- correcting mistakes), and create translated Packages file. This would require changes in dpkg. As for debconf templates, they would benefit from centralized database too, but unfortunately they _have to_ be present in a package, so I see no clear way of improving current situation. With growing number of target languages, situation can however become rather unpleasant (think of >20 languages - maintainer would end up doing nothing else except of maintaining submitted translations) Comments? -- ----------------------------------------------------------- | Radovan Garabik http://melkor.dnp.fmph.uniba.sk/~garabik/ | | __..--^^^--..__ garabik @ melkor.dnp.fmph.uniba.sk | ----------------------------------------------------------- Antivirus alert: file .signature infected by signature virus. Hi! I'm a signature virus! Copy me into your signature file to help me spread!
