Saluton, Hello, Jó napot!

The debian menus currently currently only exist in
english, "en da's niet goed" (that's not good, Nem jó, Tio malbonas).

Below I describe how I propose to change this.
At the end of this message I briefly discuss the gnome/kde
approach, and why I really like to make menu compatible
with their format, but not use their translations.

#############

What I propose is that update-menus simply learns the dutch, 
german, whatever translations for "Apps", "Editors", 
"The Gimp", "X Window Snapshot", and so on.
These translations would be provided in a form similar/identical to
the already used i18n format.

The French translations would be provided by a menu-fr.deb package, 
the Dutch translations by menu-du.deb, etc.

This may seem strange at first, as now the gimp package has no
control over how the menu-entry looks in german. It might at first
sight be much better to put in the menu entry file for the gimp
all translations of "The Gimp" in however many languages we
want to support.

The downside of this, is that it simply doesn't work in Debian.
The maintainer of the gimp surely doens't know the translations
of "The Gimp" in Dutch, Turkish, Japanise, Esperanto, whatever.
Somewhere in Turkey there may be somone who is really good at
translating all english titles into turkish, but s/he will have
a very hard time convincing all 500+ package maintainers to
include his/her translation into the package. And, a week later
someone in Bulgaria wakes up, and sends 500+ discriptions to
500+ maintainers, asking them to include that. Well, you see,
with about 6000 languages on this earth, the maintainers are
going to have a hard time.

That is why I propose that the package maintainers simply
don't do anything about the languages, but simply upload their
packages with menu entry files in them. Then some deamon on
master scans all menu entry files in the distribution, and
creates a file with all english words/phrases that should be
translated. This file can be put somewhere on the web, and
then this the translators simply gets that file, translate
the 500+ entries in it, and create a menu-tr.deb (menu-de.deb, etc)
package, and uploads that. Then, the users that want turkish systems
simply install menu-tr.deb package, set the appropriate LC_*
variables, and update-menus does what it should do.

This approach has the advantages that
  - It actually works. Forceing 500+ package maintainers to include
    the world's 6000+ languages into their menu entry files is
    really never going to work.
  - It makes things easy for both the maintainer of the packages
    with the menu entry files (they do nothing), and for the
    translators (they don't need to get the to-be-translated words
    and phrases from all kinds of packages, and send the results to many
    different package maintainers).
  - It allows users to select what languages to install, so they
    don't have to buy extra harddisks because each menu entry file
    now is 0.5 M big (5000 languages, 100 chars per language).

Note that the file with the `to-be-translated' phrases in them
should not just have entries like
  Apps
  The Gimp
  X Window Snapshot
as that will not allow the translators to really see what "Apps" or
"The Gimp" is. Rather, for each to be translated item, there should
be info on what package it came from (to allow the translator to
investigate further), and if present the "description" from the 
menu entry file the string came from. Maybe more. But we can
discuss that later.
Also note that there probably aught to be different files for
main and non-free. And thus also menu-nonfree-fr.deb
with the translations for the non-free section. I assume the
translations should be put somewhere into
/usr/share/local/fr/LC_MESSAGES/menu-translate.mo (or menu-translate-non-free)


Summary:
 - package maintainers do nothing (apart from maintaining:)
 - translators get those `to-be-translated' files, translate
   the words/phrases in them upload the menu-??.deb pacakges.
 - The users install the menu-??.deb packages for whatever language
   they like or don't like.
 - If there are no big objections (only minor points) I'd like
   to start working on menu very soon. (should be a working version
   within 2 weeks after I started).

Postnote:
  Why would we do this only for menu? There may well be other packages
  that would like to have the same `debian-wide' translation support.
  Maybe we shouldn't call the packages "menu-fr.deb", but "translate-fr.deb",
  or whatever.


##############
Gnome/KDE menu's

When the translating of menus comes up, gnome/kde automatically also 
come up as they already have translations. So, why not use those?
Well, for the above mentioned reasons: "cross-package" communication
is pour to say the least in debian, and there is no way we are
going to support many languages if every change has to go through
the maintainers. And it's very tough on the translators, as they
have to communicate with many different maintainers.

So, I say that using the translation support from gnome/kde's menu
entry files is not the right way in Debian.

However, that doesn't mean we shouldn't move to gnome/kde-format
menu entry files. They are basically already very close to what 
we have now, and I'm very tempted to simply add support for them to
update-menus so that update-menus can read both formats. What
way we go after that debian-policy has to decide.


##############

Any opinions?

If there is noone saying this is a realy bad approach, I'd like
to start working on this really soon now.

Thanks,
joostje