#237 Proposal to allow translated versions of documentation guides to contain translated summary, description, and change logs in the SPEC file.
Closed None Opened 14 years ago by sparks.

Proposal:
That translated documentation guides be allowed to use a translated Summary, Description, and change log in the SPEC which will aid users that are looking for the specific language to obtain information about the package prior to downloading it. An English summary, description, and change log doesn't do the non-English speaker, whom the translation is for, any good and the translation is an exact copy the English version which is readily available and has already been reviewed.


No. RPM already supports a proper way to handle this:

Summary: French translation of foo documentation

Summary(fr): Documentation de foo (version française)

%description

French translation of the documentation for foo.

%description -l fr

Documentation en français du logiciel foo, un logiciel qui fait machin-chose, prépare le café, ...

The plain unqualified Summary: and %description must stay in English as per the current guidelines, and at least I don't see why we would grant an exception given the above. They need not contain more than "LanguageXYZ translation of foo documentation" though. If some software is not showing the translated versions, it needs to get fixed. (A bug already got filed against !PackageKit a while ago, I don't know if it has been fixed yet.)

While including this info in the spec file is not going to help us - relying on rpm-specspo for anything is also filled with doom.

I don't have a good solution to this problem - but I'm positive that specspo is not it.

Who talked about using specspo? sparks proposed to use the translated Summary: and %description instead of the English one, I suggested a way to specify both within the specfile instead (which is already used in some specfiles), specspo isn't even under discussion as the mechanism here.

The English Summary: and %description can easily be automatically generated, it'd just say "French translation of coffee-making-guide" if the package is coffee-making-guide-fr.

Replying to [comment:1 kkofler]:

No. RPM already supports a proper way to handle this:

Summary: French translation of foo documentation

Summary(fr): Documentation de foo (version française)

%description

French translation of the documentation for foo.

%description -l fr

Documentation en français du logiciel foo, un logiciel qui fait machin-chose, prépare le café, ...

I thought this was a neat approach and have made publican do this. The change will be included in the next release.

Cheers, Jeff.

Withdrawing my proposal.

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