The closer sarge release is, the higher the problem I'll write about below becomes annoying.
When we are close to a release, most package maintainers focus on what I call "package polishing" besides tracking down all remaining bugs. That's perfectly respectable and certainly a Good Thing. Fine. This involves, besides lots of other things, tracking down typo or minor errors in texts we write here and there (README.Debian, man pages, debconf templates...) I will focus on the last item because this was my main Debian activity last months. Thanks to the great work of Joey Hess and Denis Barbier, mostly, we now have a very strong system for translating debconf templates and easying the translators work. For those ot aware of this, try "apt-get install po-debconf" and read the man pages. This, however has a drawback : as soon as the package maintainer changes one single character in one template, this means that the corresponding string is marked "fuzzy" in all translations when the templates is regenerated by "dh_installdebconf" or other methods used by those reluctant to debhelper. Thus, the WHOLE TEMPLATE which includes this string will be presented in english to users....this is normal : we shouldn't show supposedly outdated translations. This leads me to a few guidelines for maintainers who polish their templates : -don't do this repeatedly and constantly change wording. You will generate extra work to translators -as soon as you decide to use debconf (DON'T abuse it, otherwise Joey will hit you....), PLEASE take time for writing your templates. Have them reviewed by debian-l10n-english. Ask for help about typography and so on... -when you find a typo, look for other errors in templates. PLEASE change as most errors as possible in ONE release -last but not least, especially near releases : get in touch with translators BEFORE releasing the package. Their name/address is at the top of debian/po/*.po files. The most active translation teams are very quick for reacting. Send the translator his/her new po file after manually running "debconf-updatepo" from debian directory. Wait for him/her to send you the new file with unfuzzied strings -when correcting trivial errors and OINLY if you're sure of what you're doing, especially regarding character encodings, you MAY manually correct po files. For instance, if I remove a double space in my master templates file, I may assume that translatrs did not make the same mistake. So, after running "debconf-updatepo", I may edit their PO file and VERY CAREFULLY remove the "#, fuzzy" marker before the offending string. The last item is a very good help for translators if you know what you are doing. Again, be careful with character encodings.....some editor may change the encoding while saving a file. As a conclusion, PLEASE start thinking about STOPPING debconf templates modifications unless really needed. If you have to do it anyway, BE KIND to translators : warn them before upload and/or make manual corrections if you think it's OK to do this. The same probably applies to other fields concerned by translation : man page, program interfaces and so on.... --
