As some of you (i18n people) may have seem, the beta 1 release of the Debian Installer for Etch has been announced:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2005/11/msg00008.html Please do NOT regard this as a beta version of the Debian distribution itself. This is a beta version of the *installer* only. There are never beta versions of Debian. Summary of facts regarding i18n: -------------------------------- -We now officially support 51 languages including English, plus 3 languages which we support only in the alpha "graphical" installer Vietnamese is not mentioned in the official announcement because 2nd stage is completely unreadable due to a localechooser bug which was discovered too late. It is "supported", though. Some languages (Belarusian, Greek, Welsh, Wolof, Kurdish) have various "minor" problems in 2nd stage. This denotes a poor testing of localized installations. Translators, please take care of following the development a bit closer and TEST Debian Installer with your translations. You can easily test netinst images in a qemu virtual machine. Even if slow, this is usually enough to get a rough idea of whether the installation is broken or not. Most of the problems are now with 2nd stage display quirks. -We have quite "low" completeness statistics See http://people.debian.org/~seppy/d-i/translation-status.html for details. This was expected, more or less. No string freeze happened during this release and some string changes happened even in the last days. As a consequence, most languages are considered "nearly complete". Moreover, the "real" situation is less good than described in status pages as a few packages had string changes and were never re-uploaded later. So barely ALL localized installs using etch beta 1 installer will show English screens here or there. Level 2 to 5 concern packages which are often under heavy development so statistics don't mean much here I'm not worried about many of the languages. I'm however worried about languages which didn't have A SINGLE UPDATE since sarge release: Estonian, Albanese, Traditional Chinese, Slovenian, Finnish (IIRC, deliberate choice by translator, though), Croatian, Welsh, Hungarian, Malagasy, Latvian, Belarusian I still wait for an "I'm alive" sign from most of these translators (Tapio, yes FI is OK...:-))) -We now have a solid i18n base There were few unexpected breakings in i18n/l10n during this development process. Most often, when D-I was not broken by something else, localized installs worked flawlessly. -The switch to UTF-8 can happen for Latin languages I switch French to default UTF-8 in the early development stages and up to now I found no bad quirks. I think we're now ready to switch all Latin-* languages to UTF-8 and will probably do so as soon as possible. Input from the keyboard at the console will then need to be carefully tested. This is most of the time the hardest thing to achieve properly. The situation may be more difficult with cyrillic languages. I expect more contribution on that matter from the translators of these languages. Nearly all other languages are already using UTF-8 by default. Congratulations to all translators involved in D-I localization. You're doing a tremendous job....so tremendous that I often have hard times following you, people. -- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
