add a mode/envvar to turn off translations from the language packs

[Matthias Klose]

seen in #34441. The package has a buggy .po file, which is not installed by fontforge by default, however found by pkg-striptranslations and installed as part of the language packs.

- these errors are hard to find; to make it easier to debug:
  - add some instructions for language specific bugs (i.e. remove the
    language packs, or to reproduce: install the corresponding language
    packs)
  - have some environment variable, which ignores looking at the
    language data from the language packs

- pkg-striptranslations should only take care of those languages, where
  it finds corresponding .mo files in the debian subdirectory.
  maybe there is a reason that some are not installed by default...

[Matthias Klose (doko)]

the tarball:

./
./source/
./source/fontforge-20051205/
./source/fontforge-20051205/fontforge/
./source/fontforge-20051205/fontforge/utf8.pot
./source/fontforge-20051205/po/
./source/fontforge-20051205/po/de.po
./source/fontforge-20051205/po/es.po
./source/fontforge-20051205/po/fr.po
./source/fontforge-20051205/po/gr.po
./source/fontforge-20051205/po/it.po
./source/fontforge-20051205/po/ja.po
./source/fontforge-20051205/po/orig-fr.po
./source/fontforge-20051205/po/ru.po
./source/fontforge-20051205/po/zh_TW.po
./fontforge/
./fontforge/usr/
./fontforge/usr/share/
./fontforge/usr/share/locale/
./fontforge/usr/share/locale/es/
./fontforge/usr/share/locale/es/LC_MESSAGES/
./fontforge/usr/share/locale/es/LC_MESSAGES/FontForge.mo
./fontforge/usr/share/locale/fr/
./fontforge/usr/share/locale/fr/LC_MESSAGES/
./fontforge/usr/share/locale/fr/LC_MESSAGES/FontForge.mo
./fontforge/usr/share/locale/it/
./fontforge/usr/share/locale/it/LC_MESSAGES/
./fontforge/usr/share/locale/it/LC_MESSAGES/FontForge.mo
./fontforge/usr/share/locale/ru/
./fontforge/usr/share/locale/ru/LC_MESSAGES/
./fontforge/usr/share/locale/ru/LC_MESSAGES/FontForge.mo
./fontforge/usr/share/locale/ja/
./fontforge/usr/share/locale/ja/LC_MESSAGES/
./fontforge/usr/share/locale/ja/LC_MESSAGES/FontForge.mo

rosetta/whoever should "see" that the german file is not installed and maybe just ignore it?

[Carlos Perelló Marín (carlos)]

We cannot do that at all, there is documentation that doesn't produce a .mo file and we cannot ignore it or we would miss resources to translate or translations.

In this specific case I don't understand why the german file should be ignored, but anyway, Rosetta has support to ignore some .po files, we do it already to prevent this kind of situations: https://launchpad.net/rosetta/imports?status=BLOCKED&type=all

If you notify us, we can block others too.

The problem is that, anyone could start a German translation from Rosetta and we cannot prevent it atm, we are only able to ignore .po/.pot imports.

If we see that this situation is common we could develop a way to filter those languages but I need a good reason to do it.

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

We talked about that in IRC. A new fontforge has been uploaded which repairs the files.

In general, broken PO files should be removed in the package, otherwise we'll end up piling such special cases in a central location which will become inconsistent soon.

[Matthias Klose (doko)]

reopening, and retitling. the second part about debugging these kind of things ... it may be worth to do that before dapper. Often errors in updated translations can lead to strange errors. Would that be practible?

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Sure, I can certainly add some debugging and environment variable magic to pkgstriptranslations. Right now you can completely turn off pkgstriptranslations with an environment variable, but that's certainly not what you need. What do you have in mind in particular?

[Matthias Klose (doko)]

I'd like to ask a bug submitter: please restart your application using IGNORE_LANGPACK_TRANSLATIONS=yes app so that it doesn't look at the updated language packs. Does this sound doable?

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

It would be possible to support this IGNORE_LANGPACK_TRANSLATIONS=yes env variable, but that would need to be added to glibc, since gettext support comes in libc6. For now, an easier method is to do

  sudo mv /usr/share/locale-langpack{,.disabled}

for testing without langpacks, and move it back after that.

[Adi Roiban (adiroiban)]

What are the drawbacks of starting an application with "LANG=C app" ?

[Mohamed Amine Ilidrissi (ilidrissi.amine)]

Is this still a problem?

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for glibc (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]