Search in Add/Remove applications
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I am a translator!
If I search with "compare", I quickly have 23 results but I have a turning wheel endlessly. Half of the results look somehow relevant. However, I noticed that Medld, which is totally relevant and 5 stars in popularity, is not listed at all.
If I search with "comparer" (same in French, my system is in French), nothing is found, just the turning wheel.
When I look at the description of Meld:
- the "short description" is in French and has the word "comparer"
- the "long description" is in English and does not have the word "compare"
Does this mean that the search function looks for the long description and ignores the short one? If so, that means that search is an English-only function since all the long descriptions are in English only.
However, I wonder about people using other languages: do you have the description of programmes only in English too? Out of curosity, I had a look at Mint: the "Add/Remove software" app does the search of "comparer" fine (Meld is the first result), and all the results provided (more limited number) have a description in French.
I don't know whether it works similarly in other languages, and where they got their translations from. I must say, this is much more user-friendly than Trisquel.
EDIT: I misunderstood, Meld is available in Add/Remove Applications, but does not show up if one searches for "compare", possibly because "compare" is not in the keyword list in its .desktop file. You will find it if you search for "diff", though. Note that you will also find it if you look for "comparison", possibly because the MimeType entry in the .desktop file says "application/x-meld-comparison".
Translations in Add/Remove Applications may need hands, the main task probably being to locate those translations and see how they could be imported. Could you look into this, time permitting? There is an on-going l10n effort, so now may be the right time to raise the issue.
I am a translator!
There was a discussion and some findings on where descriptions and translations come from: https://trisquel.info/fr/forum/translations-addremove-applications#comment-167013
Since then, I tried mintinstall of Mint in a VM:
- Meld has a long description in French, but the word "comparer" is not in it, it is only in the short description that appears below when it is in a list
- Meld is found when searching for "comparer", so mintinstall might be using the short descriptions for the search and improve search results that way
So this brings two possible candidate improvements for Trisquel:
- make trisquel-app-install also use short descriptions for search, as there are translations for those available already
- investigate where Mint gets its translations of long descriptions and if it is possible to reuse them
Before making these suggestions on gitlab, I share this here in case my findings are not accurate.
More hands, more eyes, more people willing to help check, "compare(r)" (pun intended), and fix.
I agree the app-install-data is messy at best, and it does need a lot of attention, but since plenty of people use apt at terminal, or prefer synaptic it has not been a huge priority so far.
Regards.
There used to be a bounty system: https://trisquel.info/en/tasks.
Maybe someone should create a bounty to bring the bounty system back?
Some up-upstream information about package description translations is available there:
https://www.debian.org/international/l10n/ddtp.
Ubuntu may have further translations available, so there is still much to investigate.
This made me realize that package data are not translated in Synaptic either.
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