(for those of you who work with a l10n team, feel free to forward this to the team's mailing list...except for nb/nn, ar, el as this message is already sent to the relevant lists for these)
Dear D-I and Debian translators,
Things are very quiet currently as you may have seen. The D-I release is in finalization stages and thus nothing moves on the l10n side.
You may take this opportunity for completing 1st stage for the very few of you who didn't completed it (my apologies to fi translators as I killed the whole Finnish translation for a few days because of a mistake while trying to fix a few bad characters appearing here and there in some translations...this has been repaired).
2nd stage is in the same completenes state than 1st. A new exim4 upload should bring the missing translations in as well as fix the few broken ones (commas in the choices list). I'm nagging the exim4 maintainers for a fix to be uploaded (I wanted to upload one myself but was asked not to do so).
3rd stage is complete for 16 languages. Incomplete ones can be worked on, but don't expect fixed packages to go into sarge, except for localization-config and xdebconfigurator, maybe.
4th stage will unfortunately be incomplete for all languages. We had a small mess with Scott James Remnant while dealing with dpkg translations and a new files was added to POTFILES.in *after* I posted the call for update to translators. As a consequence, several translations (16) currently have 10 fuzzy strings. These strings belong to very rare messages, so we will consider the translations as complete anyway. Scott and I are just learning to work together...:-)...but the general consequence will be Good for dpkg/dselect l10n anywya.
However, feel free to send updates for dpkg translations to the BTS : they will be applied to the development tree nearly immediately. Beware that some translations are currently handled by people who aren't currently in the Debian Installer translators list. Don't forget interacting with them. This may be the case for some of the languages currently at 99% for 4th stage.
About Debian Installer releases : everything is currently focused on the next release, which will be certainly the one shipped with Debian sarge release. So, the development is mostly frozen and future enhancements are currently handled outside d-i development tree.
As soon as the next D-I is released, it is quite likely that D-I will be "branched":
- a branch for updates targeted at Debian sarge : fix bugs, fix hardware support and carefully bring in a few new features. This branch should not need a lot of l10n updates but we will probably need to setup a special status page for it
- another branch for new developments : this is for instance where my new "localechooser", aimed at replacing the language/country selection step will go. The support for a graphical installer will also go there as well as all other "invasive" changes. Of course, this will trigger the need for l10n updates...:-). "New" languages (which includes mg and mk) will go there for sure.....we even may decide that they also go to the sarge branch.
The details for that branching are not decided yet. See Joey Hess "status" messages in debian-boot.
New languages:
- I got informal contacts for Icelandic and Afrikaans and we can be confident that both will soon appear - I will revive the Wolof and Tamazight (Kabyle) contacts I had. Need finishing the work on the locales - I still would like to have a Moldavian translation even though Eddy mentions that mo is very close to Romanian...this just will make the process easier and give a good fallback language..:-) Locale work needed - Still seeking a Belarussian translator - Maybe time for thinking about central Asian languages (Kazakh and such). Locale work needed - Estonian still missing - So is Esperanto (I need pinging Edmund Grimley about this) - Hindic script languages will need to be revived as the next installer generation will probably be able to handle the support for them. The indlinux group is a good and active target for that and I expect them to jump in soon. - Any other language is welcome. Remember that my/our ultimate goal is World Domination....:-)
Thanks again for all your work on Debian Installer localization. We did a great job together, guys and girls, and we will continue to do so.