GNOME Lovers Needed: l10n work for locations database



gweather ships a very comprehensive locations database. GNOME-Applets
2.9.2 has some 3000+ more locations to this database[1] from syncing
with the latest METAR list, but now we need your help.

The database now has support for <city> tags (as well as <region>,
<country> and <state>). While region, country, and state are all easy to
work out, city tags are hard, it's easy to figure out what locations are
in a city (sometimes) but not what their local names are. As a result,
many names are things like "Location 1" or "My Location (alternate)".

This is where you come in, spread around the world, and having a good
knowledge of local, state and maybe even national geography, you will be
able to clean up the locations file for your area.

How do you do this?
 1) Check out the latest version of Locations.xml.in [2]
 2) Fix up your area, the format for the XML file should be fairly
evident, or you can consult the DTD [3].
 3) Use xmllint and the DTD to check that the file structure is still
sane.
 4) File a bug in bugzilla under the gweather component of
gnome-applets. Give it the subject, "Locations Love - $my_area". Attach
a context diff of the Locations.xml.in file.

If you're a new contributor to GNOME, this is a really good way to get
yourself in the Changelog and NEWS file. This type of bread and butter
work is really easy, and you don't even have to build any software to do
it ;)

Remember that all strings in the Locations.xml.in file should be in the
C locale (US english). This means that locations should use their
American names or anglicized names. Otherwise use the local name. If you
use an anglicized name, add a comment to the XML so that translators
know about the local name.

I would really like this done as soon as possible so that translators
can get to work on getting the translations for the database up to
scratch. I want to have a really rocking locations database ready for
GNOME 2.10 (and eventually weather.gnome.org).

Also, maintaining the locations database has been proving to be an
increasingly time consuming task for me. If you feel you might be up to
scratch at maintaining this database, drop me a line, I could do with
some help.

Happy Hacking,
--davyd

[1] a log showing new locations/changed locations and removals is here:
http://oracle.bridgewayconsulting.com.au/~davyd/misc/locations_changes.log
[2] http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/*checkout*/gnome-applets/gweather/Locations.xml.in
[3] http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/*checkout*/gnome-applets/gweather/locations.dtd

-- 
Davyd Madeley              http://www.davyd.id.au/

PGP Fingerprint <http://www.davyd.id.au/pgp/>
08B0 341A 0B9B 08BB 2118  C060 2EDD BB4F 5191 6CDA

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part



[Date Prev][Date Next]   [Thread Prev][Thread Next]   [Thread Index] [Date Index] [Author Index]