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

[Dafydd Harries <daf parnassus ath cx>]

On Mon, Jun 16, 2003 at 10:55:42AM +0100, Kevin Donnelly wrote:
> Great.  Do you have a couple of screenshots I can post while I try to get 5 
> minutes to get your .mo files running?
> 
> > compose.dir? On my Debian machine ...
> 
> You don't have this in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/locale?  Interesting.  Debian must 
> have some other way of setting up the key-mappings then.

No, it has it, but I didn't know it existed until you mentioned it. :)
It seems to include a UTF-8 line for each locale already.

> > - added a line "cy_GB.UTF-8 UTF-8" to /etc/locale.gen
> > - ran locale-gen
> > - exported LANG=cy_GB.UTF-8
> 
> Yes, on SuSE you only have to do the last one, really - the rest now seems to 
> be set up as default.

Right, interesting. I'm still not entirely sure what locale-gen does.

> > On my system, I can press Shift+AltGr and input character, accent or
> > accent, character.
> 
> Interesting - here, with Shift+RightCtrl, only the second works, but since it 
> IS now working I'm not too fussed as to why :-)

Hmm; Shift+RightCtrl doesn't do anything for me.

> Ah - I hadn't noticed that although the KDE pages end in .php, the Gnome ones 
> end in .html, even though both look to be using the same system.  Anyway, I'd 
> still like to scrape them somehow.

I could set up an easy way for you to scrape the status of my translation
repository, which tends to be a little ahead of CVS in terms of msgstrs,
but a little behind in terms of msgids, if you see what I mean.

> > 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
> 
> Handy.  You check them out of Gnome into your webserver, and then check them 
> out of there into your desktop, or is webserver=desktop?  

There's a machine on which I do all sorts of things, including GNOME CVS
checkouts and translation work, and which also happens to have the
webserver I use. It's in Nottingham somewhere.

> > 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.
> 
> I've downloaded these to experiment with them.  In SuSE they'll go in 
> /opt/gnome[2]/share/locale/cy/LC_MESSAGES, I suppose.

If you do have success, let me know, and I'll add instructions to the
web page as appropriate.

> > You can find all of this, plus a roughly HTML-ized copy of the glossary, at
> > 	http://muse.19inch.net/~daf/gnome-cy
> 
> Great - I'll try to work in a link to this.  Do you have a .po file of the 
> glossary?  The next thing I want to do is put together a download of 
> Omnivore.

It was there, but not linked - I can't remember where I got it from.
Telsa, I expect. It's linked in now.

> > 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/
> > The planned release date is September 10th, with a string freeze on
> > August 4th. 
> 
> OK - KDE 3.2 is a bit later: string-freeze on 3 November, and release on 8 
> December.  I think Basecamp is perfectly doable to meet this.  

Should be.

> > 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
> 
> Yes, a link to this on the KGyfieithu front page was one of the changes I've 
> just made.

Excellent!

> > 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.
> 
> If Telsa can give me a bit more info on the status here, I'd like to
> put it on the site.  I suppose I should probably investigate doing
> this for KDE 3.1 as well, though it seems like too much work!

You could try the GTP status pages for 2.2:

	http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gtp/status/gnome-2.2/cy/index.html

which indicate that it's 12% done.

> Hmm.  Yes, from the point of view of saying "a Welsh desktop is now available 
> on all GNU/Linux distros", this is probably true.  But IMHO, from the point 
> of view of an actual user trying to do work in Linux as opposed to 
> proprietary systems, you really need a "constellation" of other apps showing 
> up in Welsh before you can claim to have a Welsh desktop.  Some of these apps 
> (Mozilla, OOo, Rosegarden) are available, but a lot of them are actually 
> helper apps which also need to be translated. 

Hum. I don't think we can ever, strictly speaking, say "a Welsh desktop
is now available on all GNU/Linux distributions", as "available" and
"all distributions" are tricky phrases. I'm not sure how to handle
announcements regarding completeness and availability.

> > 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.
> 
> Yes, to be listed as "supported", and (presumably) in the box, Gnome needs to 
> do another 3690 strings.  To meet the KDE release target, KDE needs to do 
> another 5211 strings; 4463 of these are now on the site.

I think that it will be "in the box" no matter how much of it is done.
I'm not sure whether there's any practical difference between them. The
extent of being supported might just be that it says "Welsh is
supported" on the GNOME website, or it may be that it's made easier for
people to use supported translations. Can anybody shed light on this?

> > 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.
> 
> Docs are more difficult, certainly, because (a) they're large chunks of text, 
> (b) they tend to change frequently as the app is developed, and (c) sometimes 
> the developer hasn't written them yet :-).  What I would ideally like to do 
> is get *all* the desktop available, along with some best-of-breed apps, and 
> then do one-off tutorials or lesson-notes on specific aspects of the apps.  
> These could be fed back to the developers, but it would mean you weren't tied 
> to translating big wodges of stuff in the meantime.  It would also mean that 
> you had pre-digested material available for new users.

It depends whether you're approaching documentation thinking "the
existing documentation should be available in Welsh" or thinking "there
should be some Welsh documentation on how to do things on the desktop".
I was thinking along the lines of translating what's there already
rather than beginning new Welsh-only documentation. Of course, writing
new documentation is a noble goal, but if I was writing new
documentation (or adding to existing documentation), I would tend
towards doing it in English so that it can be translated into other
languages more easily.

-- 
Dafydd

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