> But the same discussion is true for the translation of the debian installer as > well. I think a language should be activated as soon as Christian's new > language > process is fullfilled, which means that the locale exist, also time zone > settings, > fonts, ... > > Only 10 translated strings in the main menu in an exotic language (or an > ordinary one) make me think "wow, great job", and allows others to jump in > without worrying about hard core locale/maintaining stuff ...
Well, there's a reason for *not* doing this: we had experiences in the past where translators popped up, translated a few strings, then vanished. We don't want this anymore. The current process, where we open the new language when it reaches a translation ratio between 25% and 33%, is quite OK to motivate translators enough the *really* achieve some work. This is not perfect, however. There are a few languages, like Kazakkh, where the initial effort has been great....but is currently completely stucked. Frans and I debated about activating these languages for the Etch release or not. This debate is not completely closed, but the tendency is TO DEACTIVATE languages which will not be "complete enough". That latter definition needs to be precised and we will maybe keep it quite loose to allow for exceptions. What I can say is that I really URGE translators to complete D-I level 1 as much as possible. The only languages that are guaranteed to be in the release are those who will be over 90%. For the others, this is very likely to be a case by case decision. We know that this is far from perfect. For instance, I'd like, in the future, to separate the master file in two files: -one with packages that are used in all default installs. There will be a very strong requirement for this file to be complete -another one with less important packages...or packages related to architectures that cannot really be considered "end-user" architectures (ie other than i386, powerpc and amd64). This could be done after Etch.... In the meantime, expect a *very strong* pressure from me for translators to complete levels 1 to 4 of the installer....
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