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- From: Keita Maehara <maehara@debian.or.jp>
- Subject: Package Descrption I18N Proposal
- Date: Sun, 29 Nov 1998 15:39:20 +0900
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AFAIK, there has been discussion on i18n issue of the package description repeatedly in the past, but never been implemented. And it seems that there's no active work around this now (correct me if wrong). So I propose one feasible plan for this. First, we have to include translated description in each package, then generate Packages-$LANG, because we cannot always get Packages-$LANG (we cannot get translated description in doing "dpkg --info" for a new package without updating the package database, for example). You might feel difficulty in doing this, but making use of BTS with wishlist entitled "Include this translation in the package" or something will help us. Not all the package description have to be translated (it is somewhat a hard work), and currently even providing a framework for translated description is valuable. Then where should the translated description reside? I've only installed a few files named debian/description.$LANG into debian/tmp/DEBIAN directory when the package was built, and it works fine. It may be better dh_installdeb to support these files, but it doesn't matter now. I've created the simplest example and it can be available from: http://master.debian.org/~maehara/description-i18n/ The description files won't installed when the package is installed, but actually included in the package in a reasonable manner without any modification to the current packaging system. You can check it with "dpkg --info" or "dpkg-deb -e". Thus we can include translated description files in Debian packages themselves. It is true that we have to make dpkg, dselect and apt to support these files (installing each translation to a proper location, displaying proper language by $LANG and so on), but once the packages with translated description have widely spread, it will not be a big problem. It is important that we can actually start translation *just now* (we may have to revise debian-policy to support translated description files, though). In the Debian JP Project, all the description for Debian 1.3 packages are already available and they are used as a part of "Debian Packages" web page. We are going to catch up with the latest description. I have no intention to stick to this proposal but to the description i18n mechanism. Any comments are welcome. ---- Keita Maehara <maehara@debian.or.jp>
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