Ack, sorry about the late reply.  I've been overly busy these days.

ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès) writes:

> Yes, but it’s unclear whether these are copyrightable, and since these
> are GNU packages anyway, it’s safe to directly copy their descriptions,
> I think.

That sounds fine then.  I was probably being overly cautious.

>> Perhaps it would be best to keep all canonical package descriptions,
>> short and long, in a single file under revision control somewhere, such
>> as in womb.  They would then be available for anyone who needs them,
>> should any need arise in the future and it would be easier for all
>> involved to stay in sync.  What do you think?
>
> Sounds good to me.

Ok, sometime in the next week I'll put together a file.  It shouldn't be
difficult; I just need to do a query against the recfile package
manifest that I have.  Nevertheless, my PhD research is melting my
brain, so there might be a small delay in getting it done...

> A related question is i18n: Guix uses gettext, and the plan is to use
> the Translation Project for the translation of synopses/descriptions
> too.  Should that be handled externally too?  If it is, we’d still need
> to have a gettext catalog for our purposes.  How could that work?

Good question.  If we keep all the translation in the separate
repository, then the Guix translators will have to retrieve the package
description translations from that repository, though then the
translation would be done.  On the other hand, if only the English
descriptions were kept in the external repository, the translators could
just do their work directly on Guix.  I don't have plans at the moment
to have GSRC translated; as I understand it, gettext can't be used to
translate text in Makefiles (though I'd be glad to find out that I'm
wrong).  Therefore, since Guix is the only one using the translations,
perhaps it's ok for translators to just work within Guix and not on the
external repo..

-brandon

-- 
Brandon Invergo
http://brandon.invergo.net