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Verbatim - the double edged sword that we play with and cut ourselves in the process

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Zbigniew Braniecki

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May 6, 2011, 11:18:14 AM5/6/11
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Hi all,

Over recent months we noticed several cases of people loosing their
entire or partial work when a combination of factors kicked in. We do
not have a clear picture of what has happened there, but we know several
things.

Rule nr. 1: Commit to SVN

SVN is the place where we store work, it's stable, it's safe, it has a
clear backup and it stores the history of your work as well, so we can
easily revert if something doesn't fit.
Verbatim on the other hand, stores things in different shapes and
factors, including database, memcache and hard drive.
Things may go wrong, and unfortunately several times went wrong :(

Rule nr. 2: Update from SVN or use only Verbatim

It also happened several times that people were working on the outdated
files while other people updated the files in SVN. The result was a
merge mess that was solvable or not - flip coin.

This is most important for rolling projects like AMO/MDN/SUMO where
developers update your files on SVN and if you don't update them in
Verbatim, you'll work on the outdated files until you try to merge - boom!

I believe it makes a lot of sense to change the pattern so that project
developers do not update your files at all. They only update
templates.pot, and you update your localization from pot, or they update
it via Verbatim's (Update From Templates). I need to learn from Pootle
guys if it's possible to let every localizer be able to use this
function as it'll streamline the process.

Rule nr. 3: Commit to SVN

If in doubt. Commit. If certain, commit. If it's morning. Commit. If
it's midnight. Commit.

Please, help us help you with this. We want to get Verbatim rock solid
and bulletproof, but we failed so far and the certain point here is this
- Verbatim is a shell for SVN. You want all your work to be in SVN, not
in sql temporary memory. The way to get there is to commit.


Saying that, we're going to investigate the cases further and we will
try to minimize the risk of localization work being lost there. It's
very unfortunate and should never happen.

Apologies for that. I'll keep you up to date as I'll be working with the
Pootle dev team to fix the bugs next week.

Please, if you notice that any of your work has been lost over the last
weeks, let me know. I cannot promise you that we have it, or that it
makes sense to revive the old version, but I want you to know that we
don't let it go lightly, and we will do our best to find your work if
it's possible.

Greetings,
gandalf
--

Mozilla (http://www.mozilla.org)

Michael 'Coce' Köhler

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May 19, 2011, 9:16:13 AM5/19/11
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Hi Gandalf,

> Please, if you notice that any of your work has been lost over the last
> weeks, let me know.

It seems, that this happened to me for our German AMO translation. I was
working on the localization via Verbatim, but now all localized strings
for the javascript.po are gone, as are lots of the translations for the
messages.po.

Any chance on getting them back?


Regards

Michael

Fernando Pereira Silveira

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May 20, 2011, 11:21:59 AM5/20/11
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Hi Gandalf,

In the end, I was able to recover some strings I had backed up. I'm
already resigned :-)
Anyway, thanks for the clarification. It's important so it doesn't
keep happening to others

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