openSUSE:Packages-i18n deprecation

Rationale

Translation support for the package descriptions using packages-i18n was introduced in 2009. Technically, it allows to translate all package descriptions, import the translations to the repository metadata and then provide translated description in the YaST Software Manager.

Well, it is a theory. In a real life, SUSE Linux abandoned limit of a single DVD, and the number of packages rapidly raised. And number of package description raised as well. The nature of the gettext based translation causes that any single letter change in the package description renders the whole translation of the description fuzzy, and its exclusion from the translated data.

As a result of both, the translation coverage remains low, even after nearly 20 years of translators' work. With exception of Catalan translation team, no translation team had enough power to reach even 10% translation level.

So the technically perfectly designed project failed on a lack of human power of native translators. It is not a surprise. It recently contains 76,379 strings, which represents 1,485,259 and 9,975,495 letters. It means that the completion requires about 2 human-years of full-time job for a single language! And with a rate of translation commits, it's unreal to reach the 100% translation goal until the end of 21st century.

That is why we decided to deprecate the packages-i18n project, leave the translation as it is, and not support further translation.

The translation project still exists in Weblate, but it is locked and will probably stay locked forever. If you have a strong interest in the translation continuation, and a strong human translators' power, the project could be unlocked.

We were thinking about other approaches. For example machine translation. But the machine translation quality nowadays (2025) is far from being able to translate specialized texts with context that needs to understand of the nature of the package, and often makes test hard to understand. Maybe things will change over the time, but now we see no option to continue.