[Rpm-maint] Question to distro folks on package translations

[Panu Matilainen]

Is anybody at all using the %_i18ndomains "specspo" translation 
mechanism these days, the way rpm expects it to be set up? From what I can 
tell by looking around a bit (please do correct me if I'm wrong):

- Mandriva has translated summaries in mdv-rpm-summary package, but rpm
   doesn't even try to use it, it's only for higher level tools
- Suse has translated summary/descriptions available, but again only
   for higher level tools (Yast I presume)
- Fedora has specspo package, but it since F9 it's in a format that
   doesn't work with rpm's funky msgid lookup (and at least yum looks up
   the translations by itself based on the actual strings in packages).
- CentOS/RHEL 5 still carry the C locale in specspo so it works with
   rpm too but since these are likely to inherit what Fedora does now, it's
   going to get broken in the next major version here too.
- Others, no idea...

AFAICT, in all these cases the higher level tools are looking up the 
translations based on the actual strings in packages. Makes me wonder... 
would people see it more useful if rpm (from 4.6.x onwards) just did a 
direct lookup based on the package strings in the configured i18ndomains 
instead of doing the extra lookup through C locale like it does now (ie 
lots of extra hoops to jump for no gain whatsoever). Does anybody even 
care? :)

 	- Panu -