Re: String strike force

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Thu, 2009-08-27 at 08:59 +0200, Claude Paroz wrote:
> Le mercredi 26 août 2009 à 17:13 -0500, Shaun McCance a écrit :
> > On Wed, 2009-08-26 at 23:02 +0100, Bruce Cowan wrote:
> > > I've noticed that one of the main purposes of the en_GB team is to fix
> > > the grammar and spelling of the original strings. However, most of the
> > > work of the team seems to be done after string freeze, when the strings
> > > can't be changed (easily). Of course, I could have started earlier, but
> > > I didn't for some reason.
> > > 
> > > Anyway, I thought that a sort of "string strike force" may be a good
> > > idea. Essentially it would audit strings while they can still be fixed.
> > > 
> > > The en_GB team could take this on itself, but it's probably a bit
> > > understaffed.
> > 
> > The documentation team has discussed doing this before.
> > We'd like to look for more than just spelling and grammar
> > problems.  Notably:
> > 
> > 1) Making sure terminology matches our style guide
> > 2) Fixing awkward and confusing sentences
> > 3) Checking for things that cause translation problems
> > 
> > I have thoughts on how we could do this systematically.
> > Are others interested in doing this?  We could have a
> > meeting or something to get the ball rolling.
> 
> I like this idea very much.
> 
> The difficulty might lie in the timeframe devoted to this review
> process. If it's too soon, it might lead to time waste, because strings
> can still change. What about some "string sprint" the week-end just
> before string freeze?
> 
> And if we don't want to review more than 40'000 strings each release, I
> probably could extend DL to show a view with only new strings from the
> previous release.

The problem is that we might not be able to finish them all
in one go, so just seeing what strings are new will lead to
stuff being overlooked.

I was thinking of using PO files for string reviews.  We'd
have some faux language code (x-string-review.po), and some
defined syntax that allows people to check off strings.

I could add a plugin to Pulse that would read these and
report which strings have had how many reviews.

msgid "This is a good string."
msgstr ""
"shaunm: OK\n"
"claude: OK"

msgid "This strng has a typo."
mststr ""
"shaunm: #1234"

Of course, we'd want to make sure we aren't building and
installing x-string-review as an actual language.

How does this sound to people?

--
Shaun