The Debian Installer packages use a debconf-managed
interface to handle user interaction screens and all display.
The debconfized packages use po-debconf for
handling localization which means that templates translations are
hosted in directories named debian/po in each
package source code tree.
These directories contain <language>.po
files where <language> is the code of supported languages. See
Appendix F, Languages codes for details about language codes.
They also contain a file named templates.pot
which contains up-to-date strings. This file is generated by the
debconf-updatepo utility when debconf templates are
modified or written.
When working on "core" Debian Installer packages, developers should not care
about the debian/po directory contents. They even
don't need running the debconf-updatepo utility,
except the first time they create the package (so that the
debian/po/templates.pot file is created).
The only files that are not automatically generated in debian/po are:
debian/po/output defines the type and
encoding of the generated templates
file. The file must always contain:
2 utf8
debian/po/POTFILES.in defines the file
containing the source strings, with a path relative to the
debian directory of the source tree. This
is usually:
[type: gettext/rfc822deb] <package>.templates
where <package> is the name of the binary package using these templates.