[Debian-l10n-devel] Removing long descriptions / english from Packages files

[Raphael Hertzog]

I'm jumping late in the discussion, please bear with me if it has been 
answered before. I'll leave Guillem comment on the dpkg/dselect impact.

On Thu, 13 Aug 2009, Joerg Jaspert wrote:
> >  * We may also need to decide what should be the user interface when a
> >    description translation is not available. If the English string is
> >    always used, this would probably force to always download the English
> >    translation. Another solution could be to have a default description:
> >    "This long description is not available" translated in the user's
> >    language.
> 
> I guess the latter would be nice. It depends on how good the translators
> of the various languages are.
> If we resort to always downloading english then the user did not win
> that much from this change.

Why not inject the english version in the Translation file for all missing
translations? That way you download only one Translation file and you have
the usual behaviour. And you can see programmatically that it's not a real
translation since its checksum matches the english one (so if apt-get
downloads multiple translations it can still choose the user preferred
one).

This optimizes for the default case and it seems like the right thing to
do. The duplicated content is not really wasted space since the same space
would be used if all the translation were complete.

Cheers,
-- 
Raphaël Hertzog