Results of the App Installer Meeting

[Samuel Verschelde]

Le jeudi 27 janvier 2011 12:55:36, David Kalnischkies a écrit :
> 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.
> 
> 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".

In fact, I tried to bring the subject of translations several times but the 
meeting was too short :)

However, without really deciding it, we said that translated descriptions may 
be delivered by OCS servers (along with per-language comments, screenshots if 
available, resources (howtos, online books...), etc.)

Another way to do it without making the xml file grow too much would be to have 
one xml file containing only package descriptions per language. It uses some 
space on mirrors, but not that much (especially because the number of 
applications is really smaller than the number of packages).

The process (how the descriptions and their translations are contributed, 
hopefully by the community itself, like the screenshots) hasn't been defined at 
all, but I hope we'll try to define one so that the AppStream project really is 
complete.

Best regards

Samuel Verschelde
Mageia contributor