Maintaining translations

[Priit Laes <amd store20 com>]

Hey guys/gals,

As we were all quite happy to finally ditch the "good old CVS" and move
on to "shiny new SVN" which supports offline diffing, atomic commits and
cheap branching/tagging, there is also one it doesn't support - the
missing feature called "checking out a single file". 

As you may think that it is not that big of a miss, then let me explain
it to you. With CVS one could easily just do this to update a
translation:
 * Check out the translations from GNOME CVS 
   cvs co -d:...gnome../cvs/gnome co project/po/et.po
   cvs co -d:...gnome../cvs/gnome co project/po/ChangeLog
 * Replace et.po with updated translation
 * Add comment to ChangeLog
 * Upload it:
   cvs commit project/po/et.po project/po/ChangeLog

All this worked fine and was relatively fast and even scriptable (yes, I
actually used a tool for that).

Now as SVN doesn't support it, we have to checkout whole po directories
and keep them around because these directories are quite big, for
example - today I checked out evolution's po files and its size is 96
megabytes. And we also have the branching stuff to take care of - mostly
only a second version (that's for my project).

I have been thinking of a some kind of web service that language
maintainers could use for submitting po-files (well, at least for
official GNOME modules) to SVN and it could basically be an upload form
where you can choose the module and branch then write the commit message
and finally hit the submit button ;)

The other variant would be implementing some extra mapping layer on top
of SVN, which would translate local gnome-2.18/module.po to external
module/path/language.po file.

So, maintainers - I want to hear your opinions and of course - please
tell me about your best practices of managing translations in GNOME
SVN ;)

Cheers,
Priit


PS. I know I may just sound as one very lazy bastard. In fast I actually
am one, but as my job as a maintainer has become a whole lot harder to
do, I may eventually quit it. :(

--
Priit Laes
http://plaes.org