Results of the App Installer Meeting

[Michael Vogt]

B1;2703;0cOn Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 12:55:36PM +0100, David Kalnischkies wrote:
> 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 Other distributions seem to have only failed (=very outdated) tries if any.

Indeed, while we talked briefly about it. It got lost in all the other
topcis we discussed later, but I think its indeed a import part of the
whole system. Probably more something to fix at the distro level as
its useful independant of the app context.
 
> 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…
[..]

When we take this from the desktop file, there is already i18n
infrastructure for this. It will get imported into the pot file and
the translations are merged into the desktop file. We just need to
grab it from it. The problem of blowing up the data is indeed there,
especially if we add long descriptions. In the long run it may be
needed that we split similar to the Translations-$lang data.

But I'm not sure if we want long descriptions in the
app-data.xml. Given that we have (long) package descriptions already,
it may make more sense to provide translations for those.

Cheers,
 Michael