Re: Translations, Damned Lies and Transifex

[Claude Paroz <claude 2xlibre net>]

Le mardi 03 juillet 2007 �4:25 +0100, Dimitris Glezos a �it :
> Hey all.
> 
> I'm working on a system very closely related to Damned lies, so I believe I
> should update you guys on my work, and get your feedback (positive or negative,
> both accepted!) for what I'm doing. I'm sorry I delayed to do this, but the
> picture wasn't really clear until now.
> 
> For a while now, along with contributing to the Greek GNOME team, I've been
> working on Fedora's L10n infrastructure. We're moving it from RH to Fedora
> systems, so some work was needed to be done.
> 
> Firstly, we needed a new web frontend for statistics. Damned Lies (DL), and the
> whole GNOME i18n infrastructure rocks, so it was a no-brainer to base off these
> approaches. We quickly got a system up and running using DL:
> 
>   http://translate.fedoraproject.org/
> 
> DL was a great piece of software and easily customizable -- a huge thanks to
> Danilo and the rest of the folks who work on it. The templates are totally
> changed, but I'm trying my best to push any update on the python files upstream
> because there's no reason to maintain a fork/patchset for them.

Hi Dimitris,

I want to tell you that I'm *really* happy you chose to reutilize an
existing app. It's sometimes tempting to recode from scratch, but in the
end of the day, reutilizing and improving existent code is often the
most effective way of making the most of existing resources, creating a
win-win deal. This is the power of FOSS!

> So the problem is that Fedora Infrastructure supports all CVS, SVN, Mercurial
> and git version control systems (VCS) for project hosting and also, some
> Fedora-related modules are hosted out of the `*fedoraproject.org` space (*fpo).
> But translators are only given access on `cvs.fpo`, so they can't commit files
> to these remote systems.
> 
> The translator shouldn't care where the module is hosted, he just wants to send
> a PO file in. Through GSoC 2007, I begun working on a system (transifex) that
> will give them access to submit PO files to a remote VCS. Information about it
> (together with an INSTALL file) can be found at:
> 
>   https://hosted.fedoraproject.org/projects/transifex
> 
> The idea is that transifex will act as a proxy/mediator for translation commits.
> A translator will login to the transifex instance running on a host like
> `translate.fpo`, choose a module, a PO file to upload, and a destination file
> and click "submit". The system will commit the file for him. Underneath this is
> achieved by having the VCS admin create a user (eg. fedora-transifex) with a
> dedicated SSH key, and give it write access to the specific modules accepting
> translations. The transifex admin will then hook the repo and module up with the
> system. Each commit will be done by the "fedora-transifex" user, and the actual
> user's details (name, surname, email, fedora username) will be written in the
> commit message and Changelog file. Transifex supports filaname filters, so even
> if a module maintainer can't add ACLs to the repo, he can define them on the
> transifex side; for example, .*/po/(LINGUAS|Changelog|.*po$).

This is an excellent idea, and I hope it will eventually reach and
inspire a future Translation Project infrastructure.

> The software is written in Turbogears and its architecture is similar to DL's.
> Basically it's an add-on to the statistics, providing a web form for submission.
> I am trying to retain compatibility with DL URLs so that if some day we decide
> to port DL to Turbogears, URLs won't be changed. Pushing code from Transifex to
> upstream DL is even harder because the model has changed but again, I'm trying
> my best to cope with everything.
> 
> I believe the whole project opens up some exciting opportunities for
> translations. Small projects hosted outside of big ones now have a chance to get
> some attention from translation communities without the requirement to relocate
> their code. And also, two communities can collaborate better by providing
> corrections to each other's modules. In the end, I see probably some mechanism
> to approve translation landing from language maintainers or something, but this
> is a bit in the future for now. :)

Do you plan to add some workflow to Transifex? I find so useful the tool
we use among French translators where we know exactly when someone is
working on a translation, reviewing or committing it.
http://gnomefr.traduc.org/suivi

> Oh, BTW, I'll be at GUADEC and will be glad to discuss it with anyone also
> attending. Here's my proposal for a lightning talk, not yet accepted though.
> 
>   http://www.guadec.org/node/786

Sorry, won't be there :-(

> So, this is it. Any ideas, suggestions, comments, are welcome. Sorry for the
> long email.

Thanks, keep us informed.

Claude