Suggest Universe packages to be translatable in Launchpad

[Andrej Znidarsic]

Hello!

On behalf of Ubuntu translations coordinators team I have very good
news to share with you. :) Thanks to the hard work of Launchpad
developers translations of universe packages are coming to Launchpad.

Universe, as you might know, is one of the four repositories that make
up Ubuntu (Main, Multiverse, Restricted and Universe). Until now only
translations of packages in Main repository have been available under
translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu/.

For Universe packages this means translations that are packaged for
current Ubuntu version are used.

To give an example: If geany 0.18 is packaged in the universe for
Ubuntu 11.10, translations in that package will be used even if better
translations are available in the current version 0.20 (in this case
the newest version is packaged for Ubuntu 11.10 but that is not always
the case). Furthermore, for Universe packages translations are not
taken into account until a new version of the program is packaged and
released (translations are not a part of language packs).
This has caused a significant delay in avabilabilty of newest
translations in the past and also made translation more difficult as
packages needed to be translated upstream, which caused:

a) lower visibility of translations (one needed to go to upstream
project page to be available to translate)
b) in many cases the translations workflow is significantly different
and more technically challenging, which scares away less technical
problems.

These problems are soon going to be a thing of the past. Of course
this functionality needs to be tested first so we are asking which
Universe packages are in your opinion important enough to be included
in testing phase. Initially we want to try this feature on about 5
packages.

I am nominating wine and compizconfig settings manager as I believe
both are highly visible to average user and are technically
challenging to translate upstream.

Please name your suggestions.

After the feature is thoroughly tested and all bugs are ironed out it
will be available for many more packages (but not all as we don't want
to crowd translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu with 30 000 new packages or
so;).


Regards

Andrej