(sent privately and to -i18n as some of you read the list and some of you don't....sorry for the dups)
Dear d-i translators,
Sorry for having left you without news for a while. Debconf was a great event, we hacked a lot during it (hi to those of you who were there) and we tested a lot of translations (for instance, we had very deep reviews for Italian, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese and Welsh/Greek/Japanese/Korean/French/English were heavily tested by ourselves).
I focused parts of my own talk there about l10n on d-i translation handling. For those of you interested, see the "talks" part at http://www.debconf.org/debconf4
The work of the d-i translation team received real great interest at Debconf. We can for sure now be sure that i18n/l10n is a concern for nearly all Debian Developers.
The very final list gives 30 completely supported languages (incl. English)
29 complete languages 100% Bulgarian, Catalan, Czech, Welsh, Danish, German, Greek, Spanish, Basque Finnish, French, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian,Norwegian Bokmal, Dutch, Norwegian Nynorsk, Polish Brazilian Portuguese Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Turkish, Ukrainian, Simplified Chinese Traditional Chinese 4 nearly complete 90%-99% Albanian, Portuguese, Hebrew, Swedish 5 partial 50%-89% Slovenian, Arabic, Bosnian, Galician 1 very partial 10%-49% Vietnamese
(Portuguese and Hebrew were completed after deadline and will mis very few strings, indeed)
40 languages are currenly worked on
We can also mention that hard work was made on BiDirectional languages support, mostly by Steve Langasek, which was jailed by myself for some nights in the "d-i hack lab"...:-). For various reasons, the BiDi support was not finished at Debconf, but indeed very few days after.
So, it won't be part of rc1, but I can now tell that WE WILL SUPPORT HEBREW AND ARABIC in the final release, including shaping for Arabic.
The "rc1" release has been delayed and has been preceded by a Test Candidate 1 release. Based on d-i status as of May 30th, mostly. This version is, except for very rare changes, none of them impacting l10n, what will be released as rc1.
Thanks you very much for the great work you made.
Now, we can focus on later releases. As usual a few changes are likely to occur on strings (some already did), so please make your best at keeping your languages up-to-date.
The changes will be either a few rephrasing (we had some usability issues raised at Debconf) or some additions (new templates as well as new packages).
The excluded packages on d-i statistics pages are now included again.
Dennis Stampfer has prepared a special page with all checkout command lines for all packages for which we follow translations, in 1st, 2nd and 3rd stages. This was made as a request by those of you who prefer working on CVS or SVN copies.... Dennis will announce this page soon.