Re: GNOME Moduleset Reorganization vs. L10N

[Dimitris Glezos <glezos indifex com>]

On Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 4:27 PM, Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org> wrote:
> On Fri, 2010-10-15 at 12:59 +0300, Dimitris Glezos wrote:
>> On Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 12:42 PM, Johannes Schmid <jhs jsschmid de> wrote:
>> >> Starting from 1.0, Transifex no longer forces commits to VCS. Yay. :-)
>> >
>> > We want forced commits! We don't want people to care about translations
>> > unless they are translators because we found out in the past that some
>> > won't care.
>> >
>> > If the maintainer has to commit translations manually - that's a pain!
>>
>> Yeah, this is a common challenge with maintainers. =)
>>
>> The command-line tool can be quite flexible though. Here are some
>> proposed workflows:
>>
>>  1. Language leaders can run something like `tx pull --release
>> gnome/3-0 --language pt_BR` and mass-commit their language before the
>> translation deadline, for example.
>
> Is that something that's done per-module? Our release sets
> have well over 100 modules. That would be a real pain for
> translators.

This could be done on the whole release. There's an API which we can
fully take advantage and extend.

> Also, there's no real translation deadline in Gnome. The
> deadline is the release. And we want the translations to
> be in all the unstable releases as well. They should be
> available in git (or wherever) as they are updated.

As much as I'd like to claim it, I don't think we can achieve
everything with a single shot. :-) Maintainers of GNOME modules hosted
outside of git.gnome.org don't always feel comfortable with raw
commits to their VCS (security, noise in the vcs history etc). Whether
translations should be committed directly to a repo is a big
discussion, and I believe maintainers are the ones with the final word
on this.

>>  2. Developers can put into their 'make release' Makefule rule the `tx
>> pull` command, which exports all translation files from Tx.
>
> I would really prefer distcheck not to hit the network.

Me too. Maybe a warning to pull the translations if you're doing a new release.

>>  3. We can easily setup a script to do all these in a batch mode once
>> per day, or even dynamically using a web hook.
>
> I think this is the only thing that would work for Gnome.
> A daily cron job (or maybe twice-daily) seems reasonable,
> but I'd be worried about missing last-minute translations
> in our releases. Perhaps we'd have to implement an actual
> translation deadline.

An actual translation deadline has a few advantages, mainly confidence
in the translators' minds (whatever I do until that time will be
included in the release, anything later might or might not get
included).

FWIW, we're going to implement string freeze & translation deadline
support in Transifex itself soon (mainly emitting notifications on
string freeze braking detection and when the deadline approaches).

Hope this helps!

-d


-- 
Dimitris Glezos

Transifex: The Multilingual Publishing Revolution
http://www.transifex.net/ -- http://www.indifex.com/