Web-based translation for GNOME

[Simos Xenitellis <simos74 gmx net>]

Hi All,
This question is about enabling web-based translation tools (such as
Pootle http://pootle.wordforge.org/, etc) to translate GNOME.
I am asking to get some feedback in the sense of "ok, not bad" or "no!!
wrong direction. Burn!".

A Web-based translation tool is supposed to do the hard job of finding
the .po files, allowing the user to translate in a friendly Web-based
interface, and potentially commit automatically back to GNOME CVS.

To get Web translation tools to attach to GNOME CVS, the tool can either
maintain a local copy of GNOME CVS, or use the POT/PO files from
http://l10n-status.gnome.org/
The former provides completeness, the latter allows easier independent
local installations around the world.

Using http://l10n-status.gnome.org/
as input looks very promising, and this is what I am asking your opinion
about.
Option A is to have Web-translation tools to grab .po/.pot files from
the statistics pages, let translate and then somehow manually update
GNOME CVS. Option B is to have the tool do the whole job automagically,
including CVS commits.

Some details
==========
a. The Web-translation tool would first be configured to work on
languages that the team leader says it's ok.
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gtp/teams.html to be used for the
permission issue.
b. The stat pages contain complete information to locate the .po/.pot
files, such as branch, folder, location of .po files and so on. That
info could be parsed from HTML. Any suggestions to have some other
format for these data, that's easier to parse?
c. There will be a dependancy to the structure of the HTML pages, unless
again there is some sort of XML file, listing the complete information
of the translation files.
d. Web-translation tools could commit the changes using either a common
CVS account (for example, for Pootle, you can either translate through
the main installation at http://pootle.wordforge.org/ or install it on
your own), or have team leaders (that want to do Web-based translation)
put their username/password in the Web-translation system.

Regards,
Simos Xenitellis
http://simos.info/