Not that much of a surprise or much of a burden really (using debconf correctly is a non-trivial task anyway) but, in line with my general work on translation support, TDebs and Emdebian locale repository infrastructure, I'm now going to require, for any package using debconf that requires sponsorship, that debconf translations are requested and updated by the maintainer on an ongoing basis.
Every time the debconf templates change, I expect the RFS to include a link to the call for translations sent to the debian-i18n mailing list (use podebconf-report-po for that support) and include a statement that the upload to Debian must wait until after a new upload is made to mentors after the translation deadline has passed. The deadline must be more than 10 days and should be between two and three weeks. Packages that use debconf should not expect to be uploaded until a call for translations has been made and the deadline for that call has expired. Even when templates do not change, I expect to see some evidence that new translations are being sought on a fairly regular basis (at least annually, preferably bi-annually) and that incomplete translations are being pursued via the relevant language team and/or debian-i18n. If the debconf templates have not changed, I expect the RFS to include a statement to this effect. (I'm subscribed to debian-i18n so I'll know when requests are made.) If this is a good enough reason for less packages to use debconf then I'm quite happy with that too. Any package using debconf must have a good reason to do so - good enough that the template needs to be translated. http://people.debian.org/~codehelp/#debconf I would urge other sponsors to consider making such a requirement explicit for their own uploads. As an extra optional step: "If your package uses gettext (with or without using debconf itself), consider asking for translations for the package strings as well - po-debconf will identify the existing translation support and not ask for translations (or send email to the Last-Translator) if the translation is up to date." Note that packages that are part of established l10n teams like GNOME or KDE can easily use that support. The extra step is intended for independent packages that would otherwise not be widely translated. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.data-freedom.org/ http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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