[Debian-in-workers] Re: start Punjabi (pa_IN) Indic Language Translation

[Christian Perrier]

(I keep you CC'ed as I don't know whether you're subscribed to
debian-boot. Please mention me if that's unneeded. I also CC the
debian-i18n mailing list which is now the communication channel for
D-I i18n, as well as the debian-in-workers mailing list where most of
the contributors of Indic i18n/l10n in Debian are subscribed. People
in these lists may want to read the full initial mail, which I copied
at the end of this answer)

> I want to start Punjabi language Translation. We are
> two person now want to start work for debian. 

This is great news, for sure. Looks like the Indic languages
translators are more and more to think about starting translation work
for Debian. Fine.

First of all, the Debian Installer translation in any Indic language
is mostly a work for the future : the sarge installer does not support
the rendering needed by Indic languages. Previous analysis has shown
that this rendering, which can me made, IIRC, thorough the Pango
libraries, needs a GTK environment.

So, this brings out the need for a graphical installer. The work on
this part of Debian Installer, which started in early 2003, was
stalled for a long time and was revived recently by Colin Watson.

However, one cannot expect something working before the releases which
will follow the release of Debian sarge. It is currently slowly
progressing because most D-I developers focus on sarge release (and
also because Colin is one of Debian release managerswhich is a
time-consuming task currently).

Anyway, having material requiring a graphical installer to exist is
certainly a good motivation for the work to go on..:-)

As usual with new languages, you need to look over the existing
documentation about D-I i18n.

Then follow the instructions there...

This is maybe what you did, as the first step mentioned here is "get
in touch with the d-i team", which you just did.

The second step is "3.1.1.2.  Prerequisites". It mentions the need for
an existing locale in Debian for you language. As "pa_IN" exists,
we're OK with that. 

The third step is "3.1.1.3.  Request for early support for your
language in Debian Installer":

Your language ISO code is "pa" (which you certainly know!). The
official name I see from the Debian iso-codes package is
"Panjabi". Please confirm this is OK (as you mentioned "Punjabi"
there's maybe room for some check here....Debian's ISO-639 table may
be wrong)

Later, we will go through the next steps....



Initial mail:

> Hi All
> 
> I want to start Punjabi language Translation. We are
> two person now want to start work for debian. 
> 
> Punjabi->
>         Punjabi is Indic Language. 
> 
> Team ->
> 
>         Punlinux (Punjabi Linux Team)
>  http://punlinux.sf.net
> 
> 
> mailing-list
>         punlinux-i18n@lists.sourceforge.net
> Thanks
> 
> Amanpreet Singh Alam
> Punjabi team
> 
> Alamwala