For the sake of getting my fellow packages/translations maintainers to get the whole picture since you insist so much on proposing a wrong solution and calling mine “papering over the bug”, I'll reply anyway.
Goswin von Brederlow <goswin-...@web.de> (22/02/2012):
> Now my patch (attached) fixes this problem by only computing the
> description-md5 field if it is missing in Packages.bz2. A simple one
> line fix. The rest of the code already does all the right things and
> looks up the translation correclty including falling back to 'en' as
> needed.
That's only if you're interesting in getting the translations back. Now
go read the block of code right above $data{'description-md5'}…
> Correct me if I'm wrong but here is how I understand Cyrils patch: It
> works by fixing the symptom instead of the problem. In [PATCH 2/4] it
> checks if the Packages.bz2 file contains an description-md5 field, If
> so it looks up the english translation for the package and replaces
> the description with the english translation, thereby restoring the
> long description for the package (line 146 with his patch).
… and this is needed so that storing the description in the database
(what I pointed to above: $descr, $sdescr, etc.) happens properly,
meaning: the long description, not the short one only.
> And now that the long description has been restored the computation of
> description-md5 a few lines later computes to the right value, the one
> that is already present.
As said on IRC, if applied after my patches, you're optimizing out an
MD5 sum in case it's present already; which doesn't hurt. But that
doesn't fix the issue with short descriptions floating around.
Mraw,
KiBi.
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