Package description translations not always shown

[Timo Jyrinki]

I would like to have this investigated for lucid, so just so it does not get forgotten I'm filing this bug.

[note: bug rewritten a bit to concentrate on descriptions from repositories. mvo already fixed app-install-data in bug #456459]

I've observed multiple times that package description translations are not shown, in either nowadays software-center (earlier gnome-app-install) or Synaptic. For example, after a fresh installation the translations are not there, even if the Internet connection was there during installation and repositories were (?) refreshed.

I just observed (in VirtualBox, a fresh karmic installation) that after changing settings in Software Sources and reloading repository information, Synaptic still showed English descriptions. After doing another reload in Synaptic instead, the translations were finally shown - but only in Synaptic, Software Center still had old data in cache.

During my Ubuntu usage, I have also sometimes noticed the descriptions disappearing suddenly, which might be a network problem related and would be nice to get fixed (don't overwrite translation data if complete new data was not gotten).

For lucid it'd be nice to have if short descriptions had zero problems after language packs were installed, and long descriptions had zero problems after repository information has been refreshed once, at any point (eg. during installation).