(sorry for those of you who will get this twice...or even 3 times)

Dear d-i translation team,

For l10n issues, beta4 is now over. Though it has not yet been officially released (this will happen in a few days as several "little" things outside d-i have delayed the images build process....and, non, this is not the flamewar about the recent Debian Social Contract changes), there is nothing more translators can do for having it more translated.

So, its time to turn our efforts towards the next release, which could be either a beta5, or a rc1 release.

The current plans, as far as I know, are for a release around the Debconf4 conference in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Several d-i developers will attend the conference and work sessions will happen there. A few translators will also attend the conference (at this time, I'm aware of Dennis Stampfer, Kenshi Muto, Andre Luis Lopes and myself.....not sure for Javier...and we can count Petter Reinholdtsen in as he often relayed information to and from the Magic Norwegians).

If you can plan to get free time around May 26th-June 2nd for last polishes targetting a release, please do. Special work sessions for l10n may be scheduled, also using IRC for those of you who won't be there.

Below are the goals I think are reasonable for the d-i l10n team:

-keep 1st stage translations as complete as possible. Idealistically, you can try to always stay at 100% there. I'm seriously hoping that English strings won't move too much except for the two recent packages. But usability reports will come and may trigger changes, so BE PREPARED. Some data have been moved to 1st stage yesterday evening: - console-data debconf translation (because of keyboard names it gives to kbd-config) - partman-md (new package) - mdcfg (new package, related to partman-md)

I discourage the "wait the days before release" strategy. Some of you adopted it during beta3 and beta4 release cycles, which was appropriate given the nature of the work then. I think it is no more appropriate now.

The status pages have just been adapted to this.

-try to get 2nd stage translations close to 100%. We currently have the problem of the shadow package : lots of translations are sitting in the BTS for it and, as its maintainer does not use any CVS/SVN repository, these translations are not considered complete on Dennis Stampfer status page.

I will propose a NMU to the shadow package maintainer in order to solve this. The package is a normal package, which has to go into testing in order to be included in d-i, so we'd better not delay this too much

I will closely follow tasksel, also. I don't know if the current release is now incorporating all translations but I'm confident here as the package is maintained by Joey Hess

-3rd stage translations : here also, several translations are sitting in the BTS. However, given than some critical packages such as dpkg are concerned, we mostly depend on their maintainers strategy towards a general Debian release. So, we shouldn't hope too much in this topic

-BIDI support : this is definitely a must-have for next release. The Hebrew team did a great work for getting 100% so their effort should now be rewarded and we need to make their language readable. Same for Arabic, though the translation status is slowly decreasing because of no recent work

-Number of languages : we were at 34 complete of near complete translations. My target is now 38 *complete* translations for BOTH 1st AND 2nd stage.

You, translators, need to focus also on 2nd stage for those who haven't yet.

-tests, tests, tests : make everything possible for testing the Debian Installer beta4 in your own languages. If possible, test up to 2nd stage, that is up to the tasksel screen. Everything that happens *after* the tasksel screen is more or less outside the main scope of d-i.

If you don't have a spare machine for testing, try using some virtual systems software such as VmWare. I have read by the Debian Project Leader and by Joey Hess that VmWare has offered some licences for their software to Debian : we can maybe get some for the l10n team.

When doing tests, try to select some uncommon choices if possible...but please also focus more on DEFAULT installation screens There are not a lot of them, about 15.

-deal with the issue of the Taiwan country name. I don't forget my friends from Taiwan...:-)

-new languages : the more, the better...:-)

We currently have possible Hindi translations and Vietnamese is on its way. Any more language will be welcome, of course !

Target : have some day MORE supported languages in d-i than supported languages in Windows XP...or, better said, support a higher percentage of the world population (you then guess why I'm currently pushing hard for Hindi or Arabic translations !)