[maemo-developers] Translating "Description" field in debian/control

[From: Attila Csipa]

On Monday 04 January 2010 17:08:32 Anderson Lizardo wrote:
> "The way to get these fields into your .deb files is to include them
> with a XB- prefix in your debian/control file, see the Debian Policy
> Manual, section 5.7."
>
> So I *think* (I never tried), that you should use:
>
> XB-Description-de_DE
> XB-Description-fi_FI
>
> and so on. The "XB-" prefix will be removed automatically by
> dpkg-gencontrol.

My concern is that if we really had a large number of localized 
packages/languages, the package database would grow really big. I think it 
might be beneficial being dealt with on the level of repositories (or repo 
components with some symlink funk ?) so when you switch languages, an apt-get 
later you have the localized package descriptions, without wasting bandwidth 
and storage space every time you update because of keeping everything in a 
single Packages file. But then again, the number of packages having 
multi-language descriptions is still minuscule and fallbacks can get tricky, 
so it might be a while until it becomes an issue (Icons are far worse 
offenders in that aspect, with several packages already sporting 10KB+ 
icons).


Regards,
Attila