L10n tools, version control sync and merge conflicts

[Axel Hecht]

Hi,

I'm really happy to see that we're moving towards our webtools actually
reading back from version control. We have code in pontoon, and pootle's
on the way.

I'd like to get to an agreement on what those tools do in times of
conflict between a local edit and a remote edit.

Now both teams were nice enough to document what happens, so let's see:

http://mozilla-pontoon.readthedocs.org/en/latest/dev/sync.html docs that
for new/removed entities, VCS wins, for edits to existing ones, pontoon
wins.

Pootle comes with a few commands and a few options to each, I guess
"anything goes". I like what I read on
https://github.com/translate/pootle_fs/blob/master/docs/workflow.rst#resolving-conflicts---merging,
i.e., VCS wins, pootle moves local edit to a suggestion.

I like this option on pootle because it blends nicely with "the
repository is king" while not throwing data away. It's also filling me
with less worries about massive technical edits or refactorings on the
repo side conflicting with the webtools.

How does that sound to you guys?

Axel

[Dwayne Bailey]

+Ryan who's been writing the Pootle FS code.

I'm a +1 for repository is King. On the Pootle side our old VCS code did
the same. The logic for us is that VCS interaction doesn't need to know
that tools hang off of the content. But we convert to suggestions so there
is no data loss. The user simply resolves the suggestion which should in
most cases simply be factoring the VCS change into the suggestion. The
translators will always be the best at resolving things (even though they
might mess up and revert the VCS change) as they can read the language, but
we use the VCS translation until that is resolved by the localisers.

We expect such conflicts to be small especially in a case where the two are
synchronised regularly. To be clear its only a conflict if both sides
change so even in a major technical edit, as long as it happens quickly
after a sync I wouldn't expect major issues.

Our other potentail area of conflict is the arrival of new files on both
sides. Our current approach is to decide who ha authority, VCS in most
cases, though we can set it for Pootle to win. I'm not 100% sure what we
do when they've both arrived and there are translations present in each of
these new files.




--
Dwayne

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