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

[Nicolas François]

Hello,

On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 09:23:23AM +0200, Joerg Jaspert wrote:
> On 11841 March 1977, Nicolas François wrote:
> 
> >> which should be easy enough to output. When such an output file is
> >> configured, the descriptions should no longer get written to the
> >> Packages files.
> > I'm not sure that will be sufficient, unless the Description-md5 field is
> > added to the Packages file.
> > The system needs a way to detect when a description changes.
> 
> That should be doable.
> 
> >> (Sidenote: Can we PLEASE DROP MD5 when we are going to work on it?)
> > Now, if we want to remove the MD5, we need to introduce another way to map
> > descriptions to actual packages.
> > This could be done with the package's version.
> 
> Think like s/md5/sha256/ or so :)

That should be doable;)

Note that the probability of a collision (Description are controlled by
trusted people), and the consequences of a collision (a wrong long
description is displayed), do not make me too afraid of using MD5.

It might be good to isolate the description/translations from different
APT sources (which might already be the case, I did not check), but if I
give enough trust in an archive so that I put it in my sources.list,
something much harmful than just a wrong translation could occur.

Kind Regards,
-- 
Nekral