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

[Nicolas François]

Hello,

On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 09:55:04AM +0200, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> 
> 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.


One issue will be for systems with multiple locales (e.g. a system with
French and German speakers). Currently, this is not supported by APT
because only one translation file is downloaded on the system, but this
would be useful (also an user may want to use French, then Spanish, then
fall back to English).

It is technically possible to make the Translation files always complete,
but this would probably increase the amount of data needed to be
downloaded in this use case.

It could also be possible to provide both (i.e. a file containing only
translation and another with the complete list of packages) and have
preferences options in APT to select the preferred behavior.

Cheers,
-- 
Nekral