Quoting Petter Reinholdtsen (p...@hungry.com):
>
> > In my opinion, the only way to work around this bug is by shortening
> > down the wording of the debconf template *drastically*
> ...
> Proposals are most welcome. The current text is the short version of
> the short version of the original text, so it has already been
> compressed quite a bit. The goal of the text is to provide enought
> information for new users to make an informed choice and not having to
> consult the documentation to understand what to select.
>
> > And, yes, that will require translation updates..:-(
>
> Yeah. It will involve getting a lot of people to transalte in time
> for a new release. :(
Here's another proposal that requires NO TRANSLATION nor shortening. :-)
Make it LONGER.
The text front-end shows 22 lines for screen, if all (or more) are
taken by the description then Choices will be presented on another
screen.
Up to 15 lines of description (including Short, Extended and blank
lines between paragraphs), would allow reasonable room for Choices, so
the numbers to avoid are 16 through 22.
Extra lines may be added on another paragraph flagged with
'translate!' the problem is that po-debconf will ignore whitespace and
this will only affect English messages, so there must be some
printable characters in that paragraph. Also, padding with tabs give
better results as it has less effect in GUI front-end.
It's possible to initially adjust the number of lines in .po files
without burdening the translators and add a comment asking translators
to adjust the amount of newlines whenever they commit new
translations, but asking them to do it with tabs is not very kind
(there are 9 per line).
Optimal results may be achieved by commbining both.
Surely, this is a clumsy workaround but it's just that and it avoids
both drawbacks of the other option.
Here's a padded version ...
p.s. Maybe consider rewinding to a previous longer version?
debian-edu-profile-udeb.templates
Description: Binary data
