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

[Raphael Hertzog]

On Thu, 13 Aug 2009, Nicolas François wrote:
> 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).

The scheme does not prevent this scenario but it's true that in this case
some duplicated data will be downloaded. I'm not sure that it matters much
in practice for those users.

> 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.

Indeed, but that has a cost in mirror size.

Cheers,
-- 
Raphaël Hertzog