Christian Perrier: Between 60 and 64 languages supported in Debian Installer
(including English!)
The string freeze of Debian Installer officially ended at 23:59
yesterday (Sept. 20th). Indeed, this was extended a bit to today, with
agreement by Otavio Salvador who I thank for this.
That allowed Zak to "save" Tagalog and also the Welsh and Latvian
translators to polish their work.
We now have to decide about some of these languages: those that failed
to meet the release criteria but were formerly activated in D-I. There
are four such languages: Amharic, Welsh, Estonian and Northern Sami.
Please find below the mail I just sent to debian-i18n and
debian-boot. I promised that this discussion would happen in
public. It will (but it will be short as we can't delay the release of
the installer for ages....and I think that my proposals are
reasonable!)
First of all, the numbers as of Sunday Sept. 21st 09:32 UTC (date of the last commit with an l10n update): Languages meeting the release criteria: 59 ------------------------------------------ Already activated and complete for level 1: 51 Arabic, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Bosnian, Catalan, Czech, Danish, German, Dzongkha, Greek, Esperanto, Spanish, Basque, Finnish, French, Galician, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Croatian, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Georgian, Khmer, Korean, Lithuanian, Latvian, Macedonian, Malayalam, Marathi, Norwegian Bokm l, Nepali, Dutch, Norwegian Nynorsk, Punjabi, Polish, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Albabian, Swedish, Tamil, Thai, Turkish, Vietnamese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese Already activated and complete for sublevels 1 and 2: 6 Bengali, Kurdish, Slovenian, Tagalog, Ukrainian, Wolof Not yet activated languages complete for sublevels 1 and 2: 2 (the mail in -i18n and -boot says 3 but this is an error by me) Irish, Serbian Languages failing to meet the release criteria: 15 -------------------------------------------------- Activated languages: 4 Amharic, Welsh, Estonian, Northern Sami Not yet activated languages: 11 Afrikaans, Persian, Armenian, Icelandic, Kazakh, Kannada, Malagasy, Malay, Telugu, Urdu, Xhosa Discussion ---------- (careful people will notice that I moved Welsh down to "failed to meet the release criteria" as this is what is technically correct) Nothing to discuss for the 57 already activated languages that meet the defined criteria. They'll be kept or first activated in the RC1 release of Debian Installer. Similarly, nothing to discuss for the 11 languages that were not activated and haven't made it. They will remain unactivated. Two languages should be activated as they have met the release criteria for the first time during the string freeze: Irish and Serbian. This adds more load (and size changes) to D-I but I really don't see any reason to not follow our own rules there. The discussion comes for the 4 languages that fail to meet the release criteria. Here are my proposals with some rationale: Amharic: I would really dislike deactivating Amharic because it's highly symbolic to have the language of Ethiopia activated. We have so few African languages. Also, the translation is nearly complete and the translator was well coping with updates until July. The missing stuff for Amharic in sublevels 1 and 2 are messages about loading drivers or firmware from removable media, the rescue mode stuff for the graphical installer and some messages that briefly appear during finish-install. A little bit more important is the message warning that the boot partition is not ext2 or ext3, added in August by tbm. I think this is not enough to drop out one year of efforts for the translator As a consequence, I propose to KEEP Amharic. Welsh: Only five strings are missing in sublevels 1 and 2 because of the small experience of PO files by the person who completed the translation during last week. One will make the regular user login name screen to be in English and others will make the GRUB password screen to be in English as well, that's all. Additionnally, we can safely assume that all potential users of Welsh have good skills in English...and will therefore very easily cope with these screens. As a consequence, I propose to KEEP Welsh. Estonian: The translation had NO update since Etch. The last update is dated back to Feb. 17th 2007. I haven't got any sign of life from the translator and no Estonian users have volunteered to maintain the translation. Missing strings are in many places, including several screens that appear in default installs. Even though one can assume that the skills of the average Linux user in Estonia is fairly good, I think this is not enough to throw users in a big mix of English and Estonian. As a consequence, I propose to DROP Estonian. Northern Sami: The translation is very incomplete. With about any other language, that would be a reason to drop the translation. However, a few reasons make me suggest keeping it: - Northern Sami is mostly used in Norway and D-I will fall back to Norwegian Bokm l which is understood by all potentials users as it is teached in all Norwegian schools. - Users will be warned, *in Sami*, about this situation - The choice of Sami will be kept in localechooser even if the translations are dropped. This is on request of Debian Edu developers to avoid them to develop a special boot floppy to offer the choice of Sami (a requirement for Norwegian schools). I personnally think this is a reward to Debian Edu and its ancestor Skolelinux for their initial involvement in the development of D-I As a consequence, I propose to KEEP Northern Sami. I understand that these choices may be debatable and some may sound slightly subjective. I however think this is the best way to be fair with translators' efforts without compromising the quality of D-I. Please note that the final word on this will be by D-I release managers...but advices are very much welcomed.