Re: Introducing NewStuffManager

[Sebastian Pölsterl <marduk k-d-w org>]

Shaun McCance wrote:
>
> You absolutely can translate the name of a plugin, just as we
> translate the names of applications.  You certainly want stable
> IDs, but names are human-readable content.  The first example
> we encounter on the web page is "Leo.org dictionary".  The word
> "dictionary" is an English word.  Germans, presumably, would
> rather see "Leo.org Wörterbuch".
>
> When names are simple functional descriptions, there is no doubt
> they should be translated.  When they are catchy words (Epiphany,
> Evolution, Ekiga), then perhaps not.  But even in those cases,
> some languages would like to be able to transliterate those
> words to their alphabet.
>
> As for the effort required to keep all those translations inside
> the repository, it's a lot of effort to do all the translations
> as it is, but we manage.  Why?  Because Gnome has the best damn
> translation teams on the planet.  All we have to do is get stuff
> hooked up to PO files in Gnome CVS, and translations will happen.
> Surely we can write a clever script to add plugins to the server
> which will extract translated data from the tarball and merge it
> all into the repository XML file.  We're smart like that.
>
You have a point here. I'm convinced that it's a very good idea to
translate the repository file. I take this into account for the future
development. Thanks a lot for pointing that out to me.

>> > The repository XML file doesn't seem to contain any way
>> > of specifying versions of the application for which the
>> > plugin can be used.  Imagine, for instance, the plugin
>> > bar for the application foo.  Version 2 of foo adds some
>> > new hooks for plugins, which version 2 of bar uses.  But
>> > we keep version 1 of bar in the repository for people
>> > still using version 1 of foo.
>> >
>> That's true that can cause some issues. But you could also provide two
>> repository files one for version 1 and one for version 2.
>
> That seems like a feasible way of doing things.
But in the end when you have maybe 5 different versions and a lot of
plugins the repository will likely become very big. I think it's best to
seperate plugins for different versions of the application. This makes it
clear that the plugins in the repository are all for one version of the
application. That's what all the distributions do, too.

>
> And just not to come off too negative, what NewStuffManager
> is doing is absolutely awesome, and I'm excited to get it
> into Gnome.
>
I'm glade you like it ;)

-- 
Greetings,
Sebastian Pölsterl