[ILUG] Debian, KDE and translations

[Niall Walsh]

hi all,

I've recently realised that Debian only packages languages for Kde which 
have met the kde requirements to go into a release.  My thoughts are 
that this is not the right approach for Debian to take as a partial 
translation is, imho, better then none and also helps to encourage work 
on the translation.   Specifically, Kde's irish translation is around 
60% in the key areas, where it needs to be up near 90% for Dde (and 
hence Debian's kde-i18n) to include it.

I'm not disputing the argument for Kde limiting the languages in a 
release to complete languages, but as Debian splits Kde into packages 
including kde-i18n-XX why couldn't they package the incomplete 
languages, at least for unstable?   Give language packs which are not 
from a Kde release a RC bug "not a kde supported language" and stop them 
moving into testing, or allow them to behave as any other package so if 
they can survive from unstable through testing without picking up RC 
bugs let them release?

Just because Kde doesn't think a translation is good enough for release 
yet doesn't mean people don't want to install it or work on it.

What do people think?   The Debian kde-i18n maintainer says "I will just 
package released languages because there is a QA process and support for 
them" so do people think this is the right approach for Debian?   Is 
this worthy of filing a bug (or appending to 
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=270717) against the 
kde-i18n source package?   Should someone file an itp to package other 
languages?

Links to other discussions of this (in English) appreciated!   No doubt 
this has been discussed to death somewhere on a Debian mailing list but 
I can't find it.

Bottom line is I'd like kde-i18n-ga packages for Debian unstable from 
Debian, but for the moment does anyone know of a good repository with 
debian kde-i18-XX packages for debian (ideally just all the missing 
langs from one sources line, I don't ask for much).

Niall