Re: xml2po

[Danilo Segan <danilo gnome org>]

(Resending to gnome-doc-list, since I responded from an unsubscribed
address, and I canceled that post, to not put moderators to more
work; please obey Mail-Followup-To for responses.)

Hi Ismael,

Today at 14:28, Ismael Olea wrote:

> I've just discovered your new tool and I'm very happy about it. Months
> ago I found the KDE's poxml tools and I discovered some needs and seems
> your work is answering most of them :-D

Thanks, I'm glad to hear that.

> I've got some questions/suggestions for you:

Rock -- xml2po is currently still new, and I do need questions and
suggestions.  Thanks for checking it out.

> SUGGESTION: the help should show what modes are available now, I think
> it could be hardcoded or maybe better detected at runtime.

Agreed, I'll do that once my exam season is over (sometime around end
of June).

Hard-coding it is easier, but not very scalable, so I'll probably
avoid that option :) 

> SUGGESTION: when creating a po file, should be a gettext header output
> for adding credits and charset definition.

I was basically just lazy to do that: I'll add that as well (actually,
Emacs po-mode adds the header automatically if it's missing, with all
the appropriate data, so I imagined other PO editors do it as well --
guess I was wrong :).

> SUGGESTION: add an option to change the output charset (you know, for
> being able to use latin1 instead of utf8), I suppose it should be very
> easy to do with libxml2.

Sure, though I don't consider it a top priority (if someone insists,
"iconv" is just a command away; yeah, there're entity encoding issues
remaining, so such an option would be useful). 

> SUGGESTION: I'm very interested in your docbook "mode". Is it finished?

Nope, it's not yet finished.  I just made up a list of tags based on
the Quick Reference list I found for DocBook tagging.  It could
surely use a lot of love.

> If not I think I could help you with some previous work[1] of mine.
> Since I get a bit confused with that thing you name "final" marks I
> didn't examine your present configuration deeply.

"Final" marks are those which will direct all it's content in a
separate gettext message: i.e. if <para> is "final", it's going to be
separated into a single message in PO file, whereas it would
otherwise be recursed like everything else
(i.e. "<para><strong>This </strong><em>works.</em></para>" would
otherwise output two messages: "This " and "works." -- you can see a
pattern here, and this is with "automatic" detection).

> [1] http://cvs.hispalinux.es/cgi-bin/cvsweb/~checkout~/rl-docbook-cutre-indenter/docbook-cutre-indenter.tidy
>
> SUGGESTION: as you can see in [1], having the right classification of
> docbook marks you could create a beautyfied output (better than the ugly
> --format option of xmllint). Maybe you'd prefer a new small external
> tool reusing code from xml2po and sharing the same modules to work as a
> indenter/beautifer for xml code. Indenter for xml are incredibly scarce
> and could help a lot managing diff's.

I'll look into all of these when my exams are over -- sorry for
lacking the time to do it right away -- I really do appreciate your
input!

> OBSERVATION: did you realized that xml2po crashes with the Evolution
> help?

No, and I cannot reproduce it: can you please send me the relevant XML
file and PO file (your translation, if the crash occurs while you're
merging it back) which is causing the crash?

Bugs are high-priority, and I do spend any of my spare time on them
right now.

> QUESTION: how do you plan to release the tool? I couldn't find a
> gnome-doc-utils rpm anywhere. I recommend you to release it in some
> manner in rpm and deb. If the tool can work as I expect we'll[1]
> recommend their use to all our collaborators and they'll need to have it
> available in the most easy way possible. If you need help I think I can
> look for some for you for the rpm and deb packages.

I know there already is some iniative to include xml2po in
Debian-proper (there was a package request already, and somebody is
sponsoring it; I don't know the details).  Of course, it all depends
on me providing a stable release of xml2po.

I plan to do that soonish (most of the stuff is already there,
there's a bit of polish to do, just like you noticed), and to name
that version 1.1.  If gnome-doc-utils doesn't come up with a tarball
soon (it should get one in Gnome 2.7 release cycle, which has just
started), I'll resume standalone releases.

> [1] http://es.tldp.org
>
> Good job and please keep working :-D

Thanks a lot for kind words, and wonderful input!

Cheers,
Danilo