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

[Michael Bramer]

Joerg Jaspert schrieb:
> 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 :)
> 

don't change the mapping in Packages <-> Translation files!

add Description-md5 in the Packages file and use the normal Translation 
file.

If you like sha256:
Add it a extra Description-sha256 in both files... after this we can 
apt, ddtp, ... and we can remove -md5 with next-stable+1 ...

>>  * 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.

a normal user need en and one translation. We have 5 languages with >20% 
translations in sid...

Gruss
Grisu