Re: major libgweather Locations updates

["Kenneth Nielsen" <k nielsen81 gmail com>]

2008/8/4 Dan Winship <danw gnome org>

Andre Klapper wrote:
> Am Sonntag, den 03.08.2008, 21:24 -0400 schrieb Dan Winship:
>> I've just committed a huge update to libgweather's Locations.xml.in.
>> >From an i18n perspective, the big changes are that a lot of strings
>> representing airport names, etc, went away and were replaced with actual
>> city names. Also, many city names in some countries were replaced with
>> better-localized/better-transliterated versions.
>
> Uhm. This has decreased all translations by 5-6% which is A LOT:

Yup. But most of the new untranslated strings are either:

 (a) the names of minor cities that aren't going to have different
     names in different languages anyway (though I realize these still
     require transliterations in non-latin-alphabet languages)

 (b) the names of cities in countries where GNOME doesn't currently
     have many (or *any*) users (because in the places where there are
     lots of GNOME users, people had already gone through and replaced
     airport names with city names and added entries for major cities
     years ago, so there aren't as many changes there now).

So while the translation stats are now much worse on paper, they're
worse in ways that our current users probably won't notice.

Yeah but the thing is though, that the translation statistics is all we have to gauge our performance on. It may sound childish I don't know, but this page http://l10n.gnome.org/languages/da/gnome-2-24 is what we use both as motivation and as goal during the big translation update for gnome 2.24, and seeing those UI stats go to 99.5% is just nowhere as exiting or fulfilling as seeing them go to 100%.

On another note, seeing the size of this change makes me wonder. It must have taken an immence development effort to complete this update, streching over quite some time, would it really have been so difficult to warn us back when you began and then to commit every once in a while so we could have had more time with some of the strings?

The reason we wanted to get this in for 2.24 is that the new
autocompleting GWeatherLocationEntry works better if everything is based
on city names, because it has the user typing their location in rather
than picking it from a giant list, and they're not going to type the
name of a random airport or geographical feature nearby, so with the old
Locations.xml.in, it would be harder for people to find the right location.

 
That does sound like an improvement that _might_ warrant this change at this time, I cant really judge that and so I won't object to it staying in but I wont applaude it either. I can only regret that it was not done differently.

Kenneth Nielsen