During some periods in the development of Debian Installer, the development team may decide to "freeze" the number of supported languages. All languages which start after the freeze date are called prospective languages. These languages won't go in the prepared release but rather in the next release of the installer.

Another reason for keeping a language out of the installer is a too incomplete translation.

Prospective languages are kept in the file packages/po/PROSPECTIVE along with the master po files. Translators can continue translating, but the translations will be kept back and not spread into packages by the synchronisation script (see Section 6.5, “Translation synchronisation”).

The status of prospective languages can be fetched on the status pages (Section 6.1, “Translation status pages”) just like every other language. However, the language is not ranked along with other languages in the rank.txt file. A prospective language is not listed there and graphs are not calculated.