On Fri, Jul 25, 2003 at 08:37:31PM -0400, Joey Hess wrote: > There are some starts in bug #157848 toward translating task names and > descriptions, but they don't seem like complete fixes to me. > > Just translating the strings in tasksel's po file is not the right > appropch, because other programs (aptitude) use the same task definition > files. Also, we allow derived distributions to drop in other files in > /usr/share/tasksel to change the set of tasks. > > The original patch which just adds -ll files in that directory bypasses > gettext and so does not take issues like encoding into account. I've > been down that road, and will not go down it again. > > Maybe there's some way to separate the strings into their own po file, > and make gettext load both that po file and tasksel/aptitude's own at > run time. I dunno if gettext can do things that flexably. > > This needs someone to get a complete fix out, or tasksel may not get > translated task descriptions in time for the next release.
I am not familiar with those tools. but I had a look. As .desc files are rfc822 compliant, I used debconf-gettextize to generate PO files (tested with German file from Grisu's site). In this very particular case, having 2 po directories makes sense, so these files should go under e.g. po.tasks. They can be compiled into .mo files and installed with another textdomain, say 'tasksel-tasks'. Aptitude and friends could then use dgettext(3) to retrieve translated descriptions. After PO files are generated, debconf-updatepo can be used to update PO files. There is a problem, this program does not work with #-comments, so tasksel should ship a slightly modified version of this script. Or I could patch debconf-updatepo if you (Joey Hess) want to allow those comments in debconf templates files (of course po2debconf will then remove these comments) too. As debconf-updatepo is mostly a wrapper around intltool-update, I believe that the former is the best solution. Ddtp translations are by essence moving, so I am reluctant to provide the generated PO files now, but the German file is available at http://people.debian.org/~barbier/i18n/tasksel.de.po for testing purpose. If this approach looks reasonable to everyone, next steps are: a. Let the tasksel maintainer decide of a textdomain b. Patch all tools printing tasksel descriptions to call dgettext(textdomain, msgid) c. Patch debconf-updatepo or let tasksel provide its own script, which does not complain about #-comments. d. Let the ddts provide PO files e. Get PO files into tasksel and install .mo files All these steps are fairly easy. Denis
