i18n po mo as a sep. distribution

[Donn]

Hello empty list,
We just received an Italian translation for Fp 0.3.0 (Pietro Battiston) and
that raises some questions about how to handle this new situation -- assuming
pomo files start flooding-in.

The situation is the tarball distribution model that setup.py instigates. For
every new trans. I have to:
1. Do a bunch of boring steps to finally build a new tarball.
2. Then that must be installed (locally) to make sure that it worked. I cannot
install locales and lang-packs for every language that comes along because
they are just too big and my net connection is waaaaay too slow for that. So,
I can't test them at all.
3. And then the tarball must get uploaded to Savannah. (and webfac)

(The whole issue of distutils and the tree as posted in another topic aside;
that still needs solving...)

This is bound to cause some bugs and bad tarballs etc.

If I created a tarball process to install only the locale/* files that might
alleviate things somewhat. I'm not sure which is better - one tarball for all
languages or one per language?

Pietro mentions patching. Besides being uneducated in that process, I am not
sure how the contents of tarballs could be patched.

So, opinions?
\d

[Pietro Battiston]

Donn ha scritto:

> If I created a tarball process to install only the locale/* files that might
> alleviate things somewhat. I'm not sure which is better - one tarball for all
> languages or one per language?
>
> Pietro mentions patching.

(only for original strings. For translated ones, I think providing just
new poes is more simple)

> Besides being uneducated in that process, I am not
> sure how the contents of tarballs could be patched.
>

Well, I would give you a patch, say mods.diff, that has already inside
the info about which files have to be changed. So you would have to move
into the fontypython folder and give the command:

patch < mods.diff

Then just tar in a tarball again.
The only point is that users providing patches need to make sure you
didn't change a line of code in the meanwhile, because otherwise patch
lines' numbers could be changed and patch wouldn't apply. This is why an
(updated) repository is recommended.

> So, opinions?

In a latter email you mentioned Launchpad.
I'm quite sure Launchpad gives you (in few minutes):
1) a simple to use versioning interface (with their Bazaar software)

With bazaar, getting software reduces for a user to a:
bzr branch http://address
command, while putting new versions means for you giving your public key
and then giving a:
bzr commit
command in you local folder every time you make changes.

2) a good translation manager, that automatically compares all .po files
with a given .pot files, eventually detects and spots strings that
changed in English and so need to be retranslated and also shows total
translation progress in all languages.

I doubt Launchpad gives you:
1) an automatism to update .pot file every time source code changes.
2) an automatism to create .mo files from .po every time those are changed.

So, altough you still would have to write 2 little scripts to do those
things, Launchpad seems to me a good idea.

Pietro

[Donn]

Thanks Pietro,
Food for though indeed. I have only the excuse that working with repositories
like svn/git/bzr is something totally foreign to me and I have so much to
learn (and no time) before I can evaluate that process.

I might have to rely on others to take the code from where it is and feed it
into a system like you discuss. Using Launchpad for translation sounds like a
good idea and I hope we get help with these things.

In the meantime, there is a new version (0.3.1) on Savannah (did I already
email you about it?) which has fixed the bugs you alerted me to and has added
the Italian translation (I hope it works). I might have forgotten to fix the
two French strings you warned me about - oh, and there are some new strings
that need translating.

That's part of the problem - the code is still very much in flux and so the
translating is going to be a PITA for a while.

Anyway, I am almost done with a system to split the help files into a tree so
that they can also be localized. This won't be released soon - I'll call
it "0.3.1 alpha" when I do. I don't want to give Kartik more of a headache
than I've already caused (and he has a new addition to his family, so sleep
is something he needs :) ) [Kartik is going to bundle the apt-get version of
FP]

Thanks for your input.
\d
----
http://otherwiseingle.blogspot.com/

[Donn]

> I do have some experience with Launchpad (though not as uploader), if
> you want I can just try to open a project on it, use it only for
> translations and see how it goes.
I set one up a while ago:
https://launchpad.net/fontypython

> I'm in googlegroups list, no more need of Cc: :-)
Sorry.

\d
http://otherwiseingle.blogspot.com/