Re: Maintaining translations

[danilo gnome org (Danilo Šegan)]

Hi Priit,

Today at 18:23, Priit Laes wrote:

> As we were all quite happy to finally ditch the "good old CVS" and move
> on to "shiny new SVN" which supports offline diffing, atomic commits and
> cheap branching/tagging, there is also one it doesn't support - the
> missing feature called "checking out a single file". 

I agree this is a feature we're going to miss.  For anyone that may
chip in with "use svn export", no, "svn export" doesn't solve the
problem since we want to allow simpler commit.

> As you may think that it is not that big of a miss, then let me explain
> it to you. With CVS one could easily just do this to update a
> translation:
>  * Check out the translations from GNOME CVS 
>    cvs co -d:...gnome../cvs/gnome co project/po/et.po
>    cvs co -d:...gnome../cvs/gnome co project/po/ChangeLog
>  * Replace et.po with updated translation
>  * Add comment to ChangeLog
>  * Upload it:
>    cvs commit project/po/et.po project/po/ChangeLog
>
> All this worked fine and was relatively fast and even scriptable (yes, I
> actually used a tool for that).
>
> Now as SVN doesn't support it, we have to checkout whole po directories
> and keep them around because these directories are quite big, for
> example - today I checked out evolution's po files and its size is 96
> megabytes. And we also have the branching stuff to take care of - mostly
> only a second version (that's for my project).

(kept as a reference for gnome-infrastructure people)

> I have been thinking of a some kind of web service that language
> maintainers could use for submitting po-files (well, at least for
> official GNOME modules) to SVN and it could basically be an upload form
> where you can choose the module and branch then write the commit message
> and finally hit the submit button ;)

It's simple for us to provide a web service for this kind of task,
except for the problem of privileges.  And privileges is the sole
reason I didn't tackle this before.

I'd like to be able to make use of already existing SSH key storage on
GNOME servers, so not to require translators remembering yet another
password (switching completely from SVN to such a web-service would
increase the barrier to entry for wanna-be-hackers translators, and
I'd rather avoid that).

Our dear sysadmins, what would be the best way to resolve this?

> The other variant would be implementing some extra mapping layer on top
> of SVN, which would translate local gnome-2.18/module.po to external
> module/path/language.po file.
>
> So, maintainers - I want to hear your opinions and of course - please
> tell me about your best practices of managing translations in GNOME
> SVN ;)
>
> Cheers,
> Priit
>
>
> PS. I know I may just sound as one very lazy bastard. In fast I actually
> am one, but as my job as a maintainer has become a whole lot harder to
> do, I may eventually quit it. :(

I sincerely hope GNOME's switch to SVN won't stop you from doing your
work, especially since the SVN was selected as the new VCS due to
translators' needs (i.e. not having to re-learn all the commands).

Cheers,
Danilo