Results of the App Installer Meeting

[David Kalnischkies]

On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 10:26, Andreas Tille <andreas at an3as.eu> wrote:
> What I'm missing in the summary and what was probably not discussed is
> another user oriented service:  ddtp.debian.net.  Translating
> descriptions of packages^Wapplications is IMHO quite important to do the
> last final step to complete world domination.  As I know from some
> discussion on debian-i18n list[1] DDTSS is severely broken and needs
> definitely some love.  Some effort to put it under DSA control is
> somehow stalled and the technique behind needs some more love by a
> gifted and dedicated programmer.  Please do not forget:  Those users who
> say "I want to draw vector graphics." will say it in their mother tongue
> and we geeks to frequently forget that this is not necessarily English.
> The availability of translated descriptions is IMHO crucial for the
> success of the App-Intaller attempt.  The DDTP project is quite there
> where we need to go but it needs more love.

If I remember correctly, DDTP got a short mention and the result was:
"Wow, debian really has translations for package descriptions?!?"
Other distributions seem to have only failed (=very outdated) tries if any.


AppStream focuses on translations of the name, keywords and (short)
summary managed by upstream. We talked shortly about longer descriptions
(possibly with markdown) but this would easily blow up the currently
rather small app-data.xml similar to how the long descriptions are quiet
a big part of our Packages files currently - beside the problem: Who will
write these descriptions: Upstream is not necessarily the best author…

So translated long descriptions are currently out of the (shared) scope,
as we simple can't discuss everything in two and a half days, but to add
another quote: "It's xml, so we can add anything we like/need later".

I guess the DDTP project will be part of follow-up discussions as it is
similar to debtags and screenshots - its more or less the only working
solution - and you are right: all of them are badly needed.


Best regards

David Kalnischkies