First of all, let me just announce that I will make several followups to this mail probably, because it drives several topics, and discussing all together may not be easy..:-)
> PRESENT: The localization effort is currently desasterous. There are > several tools to use, many points of entry (which noone names > explicitely), there is only a little bit of structure. I beg to strongly disagree on the first statement. Though being far from perfect, the localisation effort already has some infrastructure and a lot of things are indeed working. Some of this infrastructure has been hit by November 2003 compromise and, because people who used to maintain it have been too busy since them (usual Debian syndrom). For instance, as far as I know, the web interface translation system works. It does not make use of gettext in any manner, but there are some good tools around which work quite well (others will probably give some URLs). The debconf templates translation used to have a good system with Denis Barbier scripts and status pages. After the compromise, Denis moved them elsewhere, and probably hadn't time for bringing them back. This is why the link below, which are temporary links are currently not i18nized: - http://people.debian.org/~barbier/intl/l10n/po-debconf/ - http://people.debian.org/~barbier/intl/l10n/templates/ Martin Quinson, along with Nicolas Bertolissio and Tim Dijkstra from the Dutch team, is working on enhancing the system for having some tracking of how teams work is advancing. - http://graal.ens-lyon.fr/~mquinson/debian/po-debconf.fr.html (before that, *i* was the one who followed fr transltors work with a kind of home work based on a OO spreadsheet...:-)) Martin savez a lot of my time) So, no I can't let tell you that the l10n effort is disastrous. It just may be greatly enhanced on several points. This is why I appreciate your efforts for summarizing things, but as much as possible, don't give the impression that you want to throw away things which work currently... I'm pretty sure this is not your intention, but, well...this is e-mail, you know..:-) End of 1st point...
