launchpad development
Native Package Description Support
Blueprint: native-package-descriptions-support
Working on the translations of package descriptions is difficult and rather discouraging because auf the vast amount of translatable strings. All the package description for a repository component (main, restricted, etc) are currently bundled in one translation template. So each of these templates can easily have tens of thousands of translatable strings.
Goal
The goal is to split up the package descriptions into one template per source package and associate this template with the package. These templates should be flagged for what they are so that they can be extracted easily for deployment.
Implementation
As this feature is mostly using the existing structure of potemplates, it is a matter of the import and the export scripts that need to be implemented. In the UI they are simply an extra template on the source package.
Import script
The import script should provide a template (and possibly po files) for each package, named <package-name>-ddtp.pot (or <package-name>-description.pot) and upload it directly to the desired distroseries/sourcepackage. If pofiles are already available, too, they should be uploaded together with their template in a tarball. Rosetta must provide a way to set a flag on the template that this is a package description.
Database change
To store the "ddtp" flag, an extra database column might be necessary on the "potemplate" table or the current "langaugepack" column changed to hold that information (langpack/description/regular).
Export script
The export script should extract all templates and associated pofiles for a distroseries that carry the "description" flag, put them in a tarball, and make them availble for download.
