On Tue, 4 Sep 2001, Michael Bramer wrote: > > A proper solution, at the very least, invovles storing the data in the > > foo.deb{control.tar.gz/control} file. > > gettext is not a hack. Gettext for translations and dpkg use gettext > is self for translation. Why re-inventing the wheel?
gettext can not really be used for this data. It needs to be stored, in /var/lib/dpkg/status, as a single file. This is so that dpkg can make safe updates to it. Trying to sync multiple files is not a simple solution. > I propose to store the translations in a some po.files and store this > in foo.deb{control.tar.gz}. But not in the control file. They must be stored inline inside status/available. This is the only sane way to implement atomic file updates. > If you store the translation as normal field in the control file (like > Description-de: dff) you have outdated translations with the time. > And outdated translations is a very big problem. zcat Packages_de.gz Packages_jp.gz | dpkg --merge-lang > this make the patch and the patch work. I don't stress the patch and > maybe it has one or two bugs. But it work with Descriptions on my > system. Please stop just applying this to Description fields. Make it generic. dpkg supports user-defined fields, so this proposal/implementation should as well.