Re: xscreensaver translations

[Christian Rose <menthos menthos com>]

On 24 Jun 2002, Carlos Perelló Marín wrote:
> > Possibly. There are a lot of po files that haven't been moved; from a
> > quick look it seems to be ca, de, fi, fr, hu, it, pl, pt_BR, ru, uk, and
> > wa. Their maintainers haven't moved these files yet.
> >
> > But, defending those translators, I don't see why all po files weren't
> > moved in the first place -- relying on translation maintainers to move
> > their translations seems to be a recipe for disaster, since we all know
> > that it can be difficult at times to reach the responsible persons.
> >
> > Had all po files been moved at once, the old ones in the xscreensaver
> > module could simply have been removed at the same time. That would also be
> > more effective against people accidentally committing translation updates
> > and new translations there in the xscreensaver module instead of the
> > proper place in gnome-i18n/extra-po.
> >
> > So what was the rationale behind not moving all the po files? I'm curious
> > since I want to do this right away, and nuke the ones in the xscreensaver
> > module, if there was no particular reason for keeping them there.
>
> All .po files WITH translations were moved, if you look at those .po
> files that were not moved you will see that they don't have any
> translations so Why should I move them?

Pardon?
sv.po had hundreds of translations, yet you decided NOT to move it. So
clearly you didn't move all po files with translations.

Here are the stats in the xscreensaver module for the po locales that
weren't moved at the time and in some cases still haven't been moved:

da: 904 translated messages.
ca: 2 translated messages, 1 fuzzy translation, 758 untranslated messages.
de: 2 translated messages, 1 fuzzy translation, 758 untranslated messages. (error)
et: 63 translated messages, 841 untranslated messages.
fi: 2 translated messages, 1 fuzzy translation, 758 untranslated messages. (error)
fr: 158 translated messages, 243 fuzzy translations, 418 untranslated messages.
hu: 2 translated messages, 1 fuzzy translation, 758 untranslated messages. (error)
it: 2 translated messages, 1 fuzzy translation, 758 untranslated messages. (error)
ja: 2 translated messages, 1 fuzzy translation, 758 untranslated messages. (error)
ko: 2 translated messages, 1 fuzzy translation, 758 untranslated messages. (error)
pl: 482 translated messages, 120 fuzzy translations, 425 untranslated messages.
pt_BR: 1 translated message, 1 fuzzy translation, 759 untranslated messages. (error)
ru: 436 translated messages, 325 untranslated messages.
sv: 212 translated messages, 251 fuzzy translations, 430 untranslated messages.
uk: 24 translated messages, 324 untranslated messages.
wa: 159 translated messages, 602 untranslated messages.
zh_TW: 445 translated messages, 10 fuzzy translations, 433 untranslated messages.

Granted, some of these have only 2 translated messages in total and
contain errors, but there appears to be several that have hundreds of
translations and that you for some reason decided not to move.

I don't understand that at all. Are you by this saying that all po files
that are not complete are worthless and don't have to be moved?


> I don't see useful add a .po file that it's not beeing mantained and
> that only have 1 translated string or 1 fuzzy string.

Clearly, for some reason you decided that several hundreds of translated
messages weren't enough either. :(

And a po file not being 100% complete doesn't have to mean it's not being
maintained. Look at the cvs logs or the ChangeLog! xscreensaver is hell of
a work to translate; the process from scratch to finished po file is
certainly not instantanious. If you had looked at the ChangeLog, you would
have seen that sv was certainly maintained.


> I don't think that
> jwz wants to add those empty files in xscreensaver package they are only
> wasting bytes.

If you are saying that we should only store 100% complete po files in CVS,
I think you have misunderstood the point of using CVS. It's for
DEVELOPMENT, people aren't supposed to only commit complete translations.
A policy of that would be a terrible drawback since for translations like
xscreensaver where there are many complex messages that would take one
person many weeks to translate full-time, there would be no way to do
simple fixes by other people or switch maintenance except using yet
another cvs for the actual translation work.

I certainly hope that this was only an error and you don't want a cvs
policy like that.

And also, this still doesn't explain why you didn't cvs remove those po
files from the xscreensaver module which you had moved.


Christian