Debian-Project - Release Goals for Version 2.1

Internationalization

This has been proposed by Thimo Neubauer.

We could start to allow multi-language descriptions in the control-files. This gives many mantainers the opportunity to add descriptions in all languages they know. The form could be something like:

Description: <normal english description>
<more description>
Description[de]: <german description>
<more german description>

A form like this could be used to collect non-english descriptions, but we don't need to use them now. The script for creating Packages.gz could weed out the non-english descriptions so that no harm is done[1]. Maybe Debian 4.0 will have a Packages.gz for every supported language, who knows. This is of no importance right now.

We could start the multi-language-business right now before we have to translate 2000+ package-descriptions in 3 months (between two releases), perhaps crossing one or more deadlines.

Raul Miller answeres:

This is a fairly nice concept, but has two flaws:

it requires dpkg be modified, and
it requires the package be upgraded every time a new translation is available

[It also is fairly minor, for example, it doesn't talk about prompts in the dpkg scripts, though that will require some kind of message catalog..]

is an independent problem (dpkg's internal interfaces are not very clean).
indicates that maybe we should be signing the package elements in a .deb, rather than the deb as a whole. Something to think about for the upcoming gnupg upgrade.