No subject

n
if from a translator point of view, the version is not relevant and only
the content (MD5) counts.

Note: a change of the format need a change in APT (i.e. probably more tha=
n
just apt-ftparchive).

> Everyone:
> Do you see any problem with us simply going this way and throwing away
> descriptions, without providing backward "compatibility" files for one
> release? I just did a short test and neither apt-get nor aptitude nor
> apt-cache did fail on a missing long description (note that we keep the
> short one!). So the only bad point I see from a users POV is that on
> dist-upgrade time they will, for a short timeframe, see packages withou=
t
> a description, unless they use a translation anyways.

Users should not experience the "missing long descriptions" if they use
the recommended upgrade process from the release notes (but do they use
the recommended upgrade process?).
If needed, an "aptitude update" could be recommended in the release notes
after APT has been updated.

There could be more "missing long descriptions" issues for users using
pinning with different releases (even more if the Translation files forma=
t
changes).
We can check if supporting the two formats is possible.

> [...]
>  - Modify the l10n side (and here its partly guess-work from me what
>    needs to happen) to use the new file for the english descriptions as
>    input, and adapt the sync process l10n<->ftpmaster. Also who of you
>    is/will be behind this?

I think we need to:
 * Be prepared to change the input source for the long descriptions.
   (The transition should not be a big issues, dak already support delays
   from l10n)
   Michael, can you handle this?

 * Test if the English translation file is downloaded when the user's
   locale is set to English
   This should be the case, unless there is a specific exception for
   English.
   I can check this.

 * Test if the English translation file is used as a fallback (e.g. if th=
e
   current locale is C, or if the language of the current locale dos not
   have the translated description)
   I can check this.
   This might require a change in APT to specify the translation files to
   be downloaded (currently, English is always available, and the
   translation file of the locale used during the apt update is
   downloaded)
   I can try to do this if the APT team is overloaded.

 * 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.

dselect might be impacted.
(I do not know if it currently uses the Translation files, I do not know
if it will support empty long descriptions)

I do not know if dpkg is impacted (currently the available and status
files contain the long descriptions; dpkg -p will output those
descriptions, but I'm not sure dpkg would notice if a long description is
missing).

Cheers,
--=20
Nekral