[gnome-cy] The State of Things (was: Gwersyll Cyntaf/Basecamp)

[Dafydd Harries <daf parnassus ath cx>]

On Mon, Jun 16, 2003 at 12:08:39AM +0100, Kevin Donnelly wrote:
> I'm having to double-take every so often as I write this, because my PC is now 
> running Engraeg, a strange sort of English mottled with large chunks of 
> Welsh, particularly in the basic plumbing (eg file save dialogs).  After some 
> faffing about (due mainly to a refusal to see what was in front of my eyes), 
> I now have cy_GB.UTF-8 on the PC, and Engraeg on KDE.  For those interested, 
> screenshots are on the KGyfieithu site, along with an interim download (with 
> full instructions). Having it up and running certainly makes it a lot easier 
> to grep for mistakes :-), and I'd be grateful if anyone who has the 
> inclination to test this could do so by using the interim build.

I have something similar, but with GNOME. Some programs are virtually
completely Welsh; others, which use stock GTK+ "OK" and "Cancel" buttons
and such are mostly English with an occasional glimpse of Welsh. Some
major pieces of the puzzle are in place: GTK+, gnome-panel,
gnome-session are the ones that spring to mind because they are very
user-visible.

> One benefit of going into this in a bit more detail was that I found the 
> reason why the keys for accented characters would not work when I changed 
> from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8.  I had set up the new encoding as cy_GB.utf8, which 
> I think is probably what it would be on Red Hat, but the SuSE version is 
> actually cy_GB.UTF-8.  With the mis-spelling the compose.dir file's mapping 
> was not working.  I also find that whereas before you could enter accent and 
> character OR character and accent with ISO-8859-1, only the former seems to 
> work now with UTF-8.  Interesting.   

compose.dir? On my Debian machine, I

- added a line "cy_GB.UTF-8 UTF-8" to /etc/locale.gen
- ran locale-gen
- exported LANG=cy_GB.UTF-8

On my system, I can press Shift+AltGr and input character, accent or
accent, character.

I think the ".UTF-8" (as opposed to ".utf8") is probably standardised
somewhere. Maybe in glibc, maybe on a broader scale. iconv (a tool for
converting between encodings) accepts "UTF-8" and "UTF8". At any rate,
the distribution should not make a difference with regards to this
behaviour.

> The latest commits leave both KDE and Gnome at 12% translated, and the 
> relevant progress pages are now linked on the KGyfieithu front page (as are 
> the gnomecy and e-gymraeg lists).  This gives a greater sense of momentum.  
> (I'm wondering if it's possible to scrape the best data off their PHP pages, 
> so that the main items can be summarised on a nice graph on the front page.)  
> Anyway, a Welsh desktop now seems to be only a matter of time.

To which PHP pages are you referring?

> I have uploaded new KDE files for the next (Basecamp) sub-project, and deleted 
> all the Gnome files which were either (a) shown as complete on KGyfieithu, or 
> (b) shown as incomplete on KGyfieithu but complete on Gnome CVS - this leaves 
> 8 partially-completed files.  if you want any other Gnome files up there, 
> just let me have them.  

Recently I've been editing .po files by hand and putting them straight
into GNOME CVS. I have a page which shows progress in my checked-out
copies, and a script which generates .tar.gzs of .po and .mo files every
day. Assuming that your system is appropriately set up for Welsh, you
should be able to get the translations to work just by unpacking the
cy.mo.tar.gz into the appropriate place, which is
/usr/share/locale/cy/LC_MESSAGES on my system.

You can find all of this, plus a roughly HTML-ized copy of the glossary, at

	http://muse.19inch.net/~daf/gnome-cy

I (and others - namely the #gnome-cy frequenters) have been targeting
the 2.4 release. The schedule for this release can be found at

	http://gnome.org/start/2.3/

and our progress (in terms of what's actually in CVS) is regularly
updated at

	http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gtp/status/gnome-2.4/cy/index.html

The planned release date is September 10th, with a string freeze on
August 4th. My impression is that GNOME releases have been
well-organized and on time of late, so I think we can rely on this
information.

Some work has been done by Telsa on backporting translation work to the
2.2 series. Glib and GTK+ are special cases: GNOME 2.3 (development
series that will become 2.4) uses Glib 2.2 and GTK+ 2.2. There has been
a release of GTK+ 2.2 since the translation for it was completed and
this may be finding its way into distributors' updates soon.

The key figure to look at is the percentage of the essential strings
that have been tranlsated - essential strings are those which are part
of GNOME proper. Essential strings are ones in either the "developer-libs"
or "desktop" package groups. At the time of writing, we have completed
48.32% of the essential strings, with developer-libs almost complete:

	http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gtp/status/gnome-2.4/essential.html

The page

	http://www.gnome.org/i18n/

describes GNOME's criteria for languages being "supported". In brief,
languages with >50% of po files translated are "partially supported", and
languages with >80% of po files translated are "supported". I assume
that this is in terms of essential po files, in which case Welsh is
currently unsupported for 2.3, but bordering on being partially
supported.

At the least, GNOME 2.4 should be released with Welsh as a supported
language (80% of essential translated). Better would be to have 100% of
essential strings translated and some others (in the "extras",
"fifth-toe", "office" and "developer-app" package groups) translated
too. If things go really well, we'll finish 2.3's essentials ahead of
time, do some backporting and have Welsh supported in 2.2 as well.

Of course, we must not forget that there is more to the translation than
.po files. There is the documentation, and also things like .desktop
files. It would be nice to have some basic documentation in Welsh for
2.4.

-- 
Dafydd

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