Re: Mistakes in doc translations

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Tue, 2012-04-17 at 10:43 +0200, Chusslove Illich wrote:
> > [: bruno :]
> > Translators, proofreaders and commiters do hopefully not have to be in
> > computer science domain. I am not a programmer and not used to git. If i
> > have to read the git manual before committing, it would be very
> > discouraging.
> 
> Source version control (with Git or any other tool) is here only
> circumstantial to the actual issue, which has nothing to do with
> programming. And this issue can be described with the following question:
> can two people work on the same PO file at the same time, and if yes, how? I
> consider this question as still being open.

The answer is plainly yes, if you use version control correctly. PO
files might have some characteristics that make some things harder,
but they're not so special that they're outside the realm of git.

> If the answer is "yes", then the the "how" must be answered. It is not
> sufficient to relegate "how" to standard version control procedures,
> treating PO files as any other source file. Technically, because a PO file
> is not pure source file, but half-derived half-source,

This is true. If you and another person both do a msgmerge with a
new POT file, you're going to get conflicts. It sucks. But I assure
you, everybody else in GNOME deals with conflicts too. It's a fact
of life.

>  and has only weak
> line-level semantics; together this precludes line-level diffing, which is
> the core of version control procedures.

PO files are more line-oriented than XML files. Will you get diff
noise from rewraps? Sure. But we all manage.

>  Organizationally, because true
> source files are typically small and rarely under immediate interest of more
> than one author, whereas many translators can meaningfully modify a given PO
> file (unless it covers a topic which requires a specialized translator);
> this makes PO file conflicts much more likely.

About a dozen people regularly commit to the same Mallard page files
in gnome-user-docs. Not a single one of the files belongs to only one
person. I regularly commit to files written by someone else. It does
work, as long as you use version control correctly.

--
Shaun