On Sat, 30 Sep 2000, Marcin Owsiany wrote: > 1) each package should have some 'control-LANG' files (LANG would be a full > locale definition in form: [EMAIL PROTECTED]), and we > would use something like the tools that allow translation of debconf > template files to manipulate the descriptions > - this allows easy maintainance of the descriptions and checking if > they are up to date
This sounds reasonable, language specific, or all-in-one package files can be constructed quite quickly by the package file generator and the translations are stored in the .deb. I suppose dpkg would have to store a Description-LANG field in the status file? > - on installed system: > /var/lib/dpkg: > available > available.LANG I'd recombine them in the available file actually, not much reason to have seperate ones and complicates the dpkg --*-avail interface I think. > ... > /var/state/apt: > ftp.alea.iacta.est_debian_blah_blah_Packages > ftp.alea.iacta.est_debian_blah_blah_Packages.LANG > ... Yes. > - this allows to have only the wanted translations - for example > apt can be configured to get the Packages files for languages > "C", "pl" and "fi" If the extra languages were stored in the control file, it would be some pretty small changes to dpkg/dselect to start supporting this. Most of the work would be around APT getting the new files and processing them for the dpkg tools and for internal APT use. > This new format will however take a _lot_ of work to implement, so I guess > it's reasonable to allow for translated descriptions in the way I proposed > until we have that new format. I wouldn't let any plans that are tentative and targetted 4 years in advance worry you. Jason
