Re: Changes to Debian Installer first stage files

[Christian Perrier <bubulle at debian dot org>]

Quoting Nadim Shaikli (shaikli at yahoo dot com):

> Christian, is this the way Debian has decided to do things or is this
> your preferred way with backend magic to regenerate the various files ?

This is the way we will work for next releases.


> The reason I ask (and I'm sure the translators would agree with this)
> is that we in the past had preferred to have multiple smaller files
> compared to ONE big one.  With multiple files multiple people can work
> on them simultaneously without fear of conflict where-as with a single
> file, well that is much much harder.

I understand. This is the main drawback of the single file scheme. We
discussed of this among the French team also and the few other teams
which have more than one active translator face this drawback.

However, this has several enhancements:

-far more consistency among translations as new strings "benefit" from
old translations quite often (this happens for instance with elilo
templates in the recent release : they are basically s/LILO/ELILO)

-less duplicate work (there are a lot of identical strings among
packages)

-easier to see status

So, for sure, during the PO file build phase, some coordination has be
be done between translators in order to avoid duplicate work or
conflicts

However, as we currently are, with a 95% finished translation for ar,
I think the maintenance will be easier (this is how I feel it for
French)

Anyway, in the future, I plan to have all languages switch to this
model, even though, strictly speaking, working with the old scheme
will still be possible.