Re: Introducing NewStuffManager

[Shahms King <shahms shahms com>]

Shaun McCance wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-10-06 at 21:10 +0200, Sebastian P�erl wrote:
> > Shaun McCance wrote:
> > > I have some comments and questions after reading that
> > > page.  Mind you, I haven't downloaded NewStuffManager
> > > or dug into it.  I'm going off of what you've described
> > > on the web page.
> > >
> > > The repository XML files contain human-readable strings,
> > > like the name element.  From the RNG scheme, it doesn't
> > > appear these can be localized using the standard xml:lang
> > > attribute.
> > I must admit didn't think of i18n or l10n at all.
> >
> > But I don't think it's a good idea to internationalize the repository's
> > XML file.
> > Especially the name element. Can you really translate the name of a plugin?
> > Furthermore, it would be lot of work to translate all the stuff for a big
> > repository and contents can change often. So you would need to translate
> > the file over and over again.
> > Lastly. RPM or deb files aren't internationalized either.
>
> I didn't know RPM and deb weren't internationalized.  If that's
> the case, I think that's a very poor decision on the parts of
> those developers.  Both of them contain a lot of information
> that should be translated into the user's language.

Woah there.  I can't say for debs, but RPM files most assuredly are 
internationalized.  There are some oddities with encodings but packagers 
can provide locale dependent descriptions (and, I *think* summaries). 
Fedora, at least, requires that spec files be written using US-ASCII 
when possible and UTF-8 otherwise, but I'm pretty sure it's possible to 
write specfiles in other encodings, as problematic as that might be.

--Shahms