6.6.1. Handling debconf translations

Like porters, translators have a difficult task. They work on many packages and must collaborate with many different maintainers. Moreover, most of the time, they are not native English speakers, so you may need to be particularly patient with them.

The goal of debconf was to make package configuration easier for maintainers and for users. Originally, translation of debconf templates was handled with debconf-mergetemplate. However, that technique is now deprecated; the best way to accomplish debconf internationalization is by using the po-debconf package. This method is easier both for maintainer and translators; transition scripts are provided.

Using po-debconf, the translation is stored in .po files (drawing from gettext translation techniques). Special template files contain the original messages and mark which fields are translatable. When you change the value of a translatable field, by calling debconf-updatepo, the translation is marked as needing attention from the translators. Then, at build time, the dh_installdebconf program takes care of all the needed magic to add the template along with the up-to-date translations into the binary packages. Refer to the po-debconf 7 manual page for details.