update from upstream

[Colin Watson]

On Wed, Mar 05, 2008 at 11:13:21AM +0100, TG wrote:
> I translate debian installed and xfce at ubuntu as well as upstream to
> amharic. For obvious reasons I prefer to translate upstream. But I noticed
> for a very long time (for the last 3 releases if i am not mistaken) at least
> the the debian installer amharic po files at ubuntu are not updated. Who is
> supposed to update the files from upstreams? the translators or sys admins
> at rosetta?

Neither. debian-installer is a special case; it is updated by means of
the Ubuntu installer team merging changes from Debian, which we do at
least every six months.

However: while you have been working on d-i Amharic translations for
some time (since November 2006), Amharic was only actually *activated*
in d-i upstream on 8 January, which was after the point when we stopped
automatically importing changes from Debian. Before that time, those
translations weren't present in Debian installation CDs, and so they
simply weren't available for us to update. While it might have been
possible to add it if we'd found out about this earlier, at this point
it's unfortunately likely to be rather invasive and a lot of work to
merge all the newer versions of installer components from Debian to add
Amharic support. Some of those new versions add unstable features that
we don't want yet, so it would be very much a manual and
labour-intensive process.

There should be no problem in making this translation available in
Ubuntu 8.10, and you're definitely doing the most convenient thing in
translating d-i upstream (again, this is a special case due to lack of
language packs for the installer).

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]