Re: Translations for LSR project

["Christian Rose" <menthos gnome org>]

On 6/1/06, Peter Parente <parente gmail com> wrote:
> Lucky day. intltool-update --pot works fine. In fact, it actually
> appears to do a better job than pygettext. I was not aware of this
> improvement.

Great!


> We already know that msginit works to generate language specific files
> and have our install process setup properly to build po's and install
> them as mo's. (At least it works with the dummy en_US.po translation
> we provide.)

Your build tools shouldn't touch the po files -- in GNOME, the
translators update their po files themselves using intltool-update.
This reduces the likelyhood of CVS conflicts and the like when a
translator might spend days or weeks updating a translation. So it
would help if you could treat the po files themselves as the domains
of translators.

The build tools should, however, of course produce the mo files and do
XML merging using intltool if necessary.

Other files in the po directory, like POTFILES.in or POTFILES.skip, is
the responsibility of the programmer's to maintain. This is because a
programmer which is involved with the development of the project would
most certainly know which source files are actually used and which are
not, whereas J. Random Translator would not. Fortunately,
"intltool-update --maintain" makes finding stray files which have not
been enlisted easy.


> I will go through the rest of i18n guide you sent me and
> make sure all other requirements are met.
>
> I do have one question. The license on LSR is the Common Public
> License. It is an approved OSI license
> (http://www.opensource.org/licenses/cpl1.0.php) but it isn't the GPL.
> Is this a problem? How does licensing work for translations? Do they
> inherit the license of the project or does gnome require the
> translations to be GPL?

We do not have a general copyright assignment procedure in the GTP, so
AFAIUI technically the translations belong to the translator who
contributed it, if nothing else is stated, and under what license
terms I do not know. But IANAL of course.

If you want to play safe, you can request that all contributed
translations properly say
"This file is distributed under the same license as the LSR package."
in their header, and ask for the translations to be removed if not.


Christian