Debian packaging and localization of control files

Question

Is there a way to provide localized versions of the Debian packaging control files (changelog, control and copyright for example) ?

Answer 1

The format is laid down in the Debian Policy Manual, chapters 4 and 5. I don't see any provision for localisation. I suspect this is because control and changelog are heavily machine-parsed; allowing the field names to change risks vastly overcomplicating the mechanisms which deal with them. It is a bad idea to localise copyright because that is supposed to be a verbatim copy of the upstream package's copyright declaration: also, being a legal document, translating it is risky.

Besides, most users never see these files. Why do you want to localise them?

Answer 2

That depends on the type of text you want to translate. I suggest to take a look at the Developer's Reference (8.1. How translations are handled within Debian).

As far as I know there is no support for changelog.Debian translations and the translations of package descriptions are maintained independently of the packages. So far, tha copyright files have been plain text files, so it should be possible to include translations in the same file.