Bubulle's weblog

Full moon is bright in the skies today and tomorrow. Moreover, it will share the skies with Mars, reaching its opposition point.

So, for everybody around, just go outside a few hours after sunset and enjoy. Tomorrow (Dec. 24th), some will even enjoy an occultation with the Moon passing in front of Mars. See this page for occultation details and locations. In short: state of Washington, USA, British Columbia (CA) and other parts of Western Canada, Greenland, Scotland, Germany, Czech Republik, Hungary, Serbia, Greece, Turkey, Lebanon, Israel. Then some parts of Armenia, Iran, Uzbekistan, Russia (Siberia) and Aleoutians.

Some more important things happened this week for Debian Installer i18n:

• First of all, Amharic was activated. The longstanding translation effort is reaching its end with Tegegne Tefera completing 87% of the core D-I translations and, more importantly, all strings for the most used packages. Amharic is the national language of Ethiopia and is indeed our second 'native' African language, after Wolof. This is indeed the first language we activate for lenny and that could be a sign of some revival in D-I i18n work.
• I also completed the tests phase of a new version of the 'synchronization script' that allows having all translatable strings for D-I package in a single (giant) PO file. Up to now, we were requiring translators to complete that file before we activate languages. However, many strings in the file are related to very rarely used features or high-end architectures. As the probably of someone installing Debian with LVM support on a s390 machine in something else than English is pretty low, we had to do something. So, very soon, the core D-I file should be splitted in five subfiles:
  • sublevel 1: default installs on common architectures
  • sublevel 2: general strings not used during default installs
  • sublevel 3: expert strings (some low prio, some for e.g. RAID)
  • sublevel 4: specific to less-popular arches (powerpc, mips, sparc) or used in experimental features
  • sublevel 5: same for high-end (hppa, ia64, s390) and hobby (m68k) arches and old stuff (partconf, partitioner, that are replaced by partman for a while)
  This will of course allow translators to better prioritize their work. We'll probably activate languages when translators complete the first two sublevels or so (that remains to be discussed). Thanks anyway to Frans Pop for the numerous good ideas he bringed when we discussed this.
• Armenian got its first commit in the D-I SVN. While the translated ratio is still very low, that's a positive sign
• Effort to translate D-I in Kashmiri should start soon as Rakesh Pandit seems very motivated to work on it
• Several languages from India should also soon raise their translation ratio: Kannada, Telugu, Marathi are expected...

All this work is meant to give some more push to D-I localization effort that paced for some time last months while I focused my attention on some other areas. It seems to show that things never work without someone to care about them, apparently..:-)...so, existing translators, watch out, I'm back on D-I i18n and will kick your asses if you don't keep your translations up to date..:-)