Pakanto

Software package descriptions are the foundation of modern package management software (like Yum, YaST, urpmi, Adept, emerge...) on Unix/Linux: You can search in a large pool of software provided by the distribution and can install the right software for your needs with one single mouse click or command.

So if the software package descriptions are poor quality the best search algorithm can't do much. So if you search for functionality and not application names it is crucial to have localized and non-geeky package descriptions.

Current package description i18n systems (for example in Debian) are modeled like translation of UI strings of Linux software: The english text is "the law" and cannot be changed (within the same tool) and the translations get derived from it. The problem is: If the English text is crap the translation is wasted time. That's currently a problem with package descriptions. English package descriptions aren't that helpful for average people and so translating them won't improve anything for end users.

This led to the idea of the Pakanto wiki for writing these package descriptions. A wiki gets used for parallel editing (the german version can be written previous to the english one for example) and not strict translation and of course it is much more easier than a custom web translation interface and bugzilla...

The Pakanto wiki is not meant to be an online knowledge base like Wikipedia but a platform for writing package descriptions that can be embedded for offline usage in current software packages without changing the package management software at all.

Long story short here are some links how it works in detail (and what still needs to be done ;-):

• Main_Page
• Packages
• Project_scope
• About
• Licensing_requirements
• TODO_list

The project is work in progress as everything and so the maintainer (Daniel Arnold) will be really interested in some feedback about it.