Re: Some details of what happened (was: Re: HEADS-UP! URGENT! Major problem with translations for Hardy and Intrepid.)

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

>  * in some cases upstream did not set the c-format flag correctly

No but that is a development issue right? According to the gettext
manual[1] we shuldn't ever touch any other than the fuzzy flag, so for
the modules where that is the problem you can have anybody forward the
bug report upstream, that does not have to be done by translators.

Second, I must admit that, despite of your explanations, I don't at
all understand how a po-file that doesn't pass the necessary checks,
can ever end up being shipped and used.

Regards Kenneth Nielsen

[1] http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/gettext.html#PO-Files

>
> To catch all possible erroneous translations we enforced the c-format
> flag on all messages when doing our analysis. The outcome (
> http://people.ubuntu.com/~arne/langpack_errors/ ) has therefor some
> false positives.
>
> [Quote from Danilo to illustrate the problem]
> Indeed.  c-format and no-c-format flags come from packaged templates, so
> it's up to them to decide on the proper usage (i.e. Launchpad doesn't
> have enough knowledge to insert them properly).  Note that any approach
> to find every _potential_ problem would give us a lot of
> false-positives.
>
> I.e. "Insert % sign" is treated as space-padded "%s" modifier if marked
> as c-format string, but is definitely not one.  To properly decide if
> any one case is a genuine problem or not, one would have to dive into
> the code that uses the string itself.
> [/Quote]
>
>> Anyway, I think I'd express quite accurately the feeling of many l10n
>> teams members if I say we're somewhat tired of those problems. Rosetta
>> has allowed people to fork upstream translations when we should only
>> have changed Ubuntu-specific strings. This leads to a terrible mess
>> where small teams have to manage a dramatically large textual domain
>> that they can't really master. Upstream translators work far better than
>> we can do on their projects, and avoid the kind of trouble we're now
>> facing: downstream-modified strings that don't get fixed when upstream
>> updates them. We really need a solution here, like locking translations
>> for packages that belong to upstream.
>
> Wouldn't have helped in this case. The buggy translations came from
> upstream. I agree that in some cases some locking would be useful. But
> on the other hand, if upstream translations have problems, they can be
> fixed faster for our users by using Launchpad (especially for stable
> releases, which don't receive upstream updates anymore except for
> regression and security fixes).
>
>> I'm sorry if this complaint sounds rude, but the tone of your message
>> and your way of presenting things isn't fair either. We're mostly
>> benevolent people here, and we suffer all the time from Launchpad's
>> framwerok problems I've just described. We're not here only to obey
>> Canonical, and I think we deserve more than orders like "please report
>> back". I appreciate your work on Ubuntu l10n, but please also understand
>> ours. We need to understand what can be done in the future to avoid this
>> kind of mess rather than blindly fixing things, waiting for new bugs to
>> arise.
>
> I'm sorry if my initial mails sounded rude, that was not my intention.
> However, I need to say that I wish to receive more feedback from you
> guys, especially when it comes to language-pack testing. Whenever we
> prepare new language-packs, they go to -proposed for stable releases and
> need to be tested before released to -updates. Since I'm doing this I
> haven't received any feedback if those proposed language-pack updates
> were actually OK. I ended up testing some languages I'm roughly familiar
> with myself (although I actually don't have the time for that, I'm
> usually busy with development and bug fixing). Therefor the "please
> report back" statement.
>
> Since I am largely in charge of everything related to language support
> in ubuntu on the Canonical side, I would really appreciate it to receive
> feedback from you guys about problems or needed improvements in ubuntu
> in regard to language support (input handling, fonts, rendering and also
> translation related things). I don't have anything to do with Launchpad
> though, so complaints about Launchpad need to be directed to the
> Launchpad Translation Team via bug reports or questions. (They are
> notoriously under-staffed, though.)
>
> Thanks for taking care of the translations, I know you do this
> voluntarily and in your free time (I also work on several projects in my
> limited free time) and I appreciate it.
>
> Cheers
> Arne
>
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