Gtranslator: Present and Future

[Seán de Búrca <leftmostcat gmail com>]

WARNING: Long email.

   I've been speaking with Ignacio quite a bit recently on IRC (in 
#i18n on GimpNet) and in our discussions we've come up with a number of 
things that should be addressed. I'd like to get the ball rolling and as 
such I intend this email to be a very general discussion of where things 
are at now and where they're going. (I will stick to talking about the 
GOBJECT_WORK branch as that's what I've been working on.)

   It was mentioned earlier today that Pablo had commented on lack of 
communication. As such, I think I'll make it my first priority to 
address what I've been doing and what my immediate plans are. (I know 
I'm not really a dev for gtranslator but I'd like to continue 
contributing.) Largely my focus has been making improvements to 
functionality that I feel is necessary to my own translation work and 
making gtranslator fit in with the GNOME desktop better. To this end, 
I've been cleaning up strings and trying to bring the interface together 
a little better. For the next little bit, I intend on continuing this 
sort of cleanup work. Following is a list of things I plan on doing and 
some notes, in no particular order:

       * Put some sort of distinguishing string in the tabs so that 
translators can tell open files apart. Currently, I'm thinking that the 
contents of Project-Id-Version in the PO header is a good way to go. 
Filenames are too ambiguous. Every file I work on is going to be named 
ga.po so having five tabs that all say that won't be helpful. 
Project-Id-Version will give at least a semi-unique name to each open file.

       * Change around the visual cue for translated/untranslated/fuzzy 
messages. The current text coloring is next to impossible to read and, 
for my part, I find that it isn't visually striking enough to quickly 
distinguish between an untranslated and a fuzzy message while scrolling 
through the message table. I've had a few thoughts on this but I'm 
unsure of the direction I'd like to go in. One thought was changing the 
background colors of individual rows. Themes could be respected by using 
symbolic colors, though I haven't quite figured out how to do this. 
Another problem is that I can't figure out how to change the background 
color of a full row. It's possible to do it with individual cells but 
this leaves unattractive gaps and doesn't respect the rules_hint. 
Another idea I've tossed around is some sort of icon for each status, 
but we'd have to figure out how to respect themes and how to make them 
visually striking enough. Then we'd have to get someone to create the 
images for us. We could probably ask the Tango guys to do this at some 
point if we decided to go this way.

       * Preferences could probably do with a bit of attention. We 
should look at key names, contents and location and clean up where 
things are stored in GConf. Additionally, we should take stock of which 
preferences we really need and see if anything is missing right now. I 
plan on getting header related things working shortly unless someone 
else is working on this right now. One thing I'd like to address right 
now is the necessity of specifying the number of plurals. I think we 
should obtain this programmatically from the Plural-Forms string. 
Additionally, I'd like to see the Plural-Forms string parsed out so that 
we can give the user a hint as to which plural form he's currently 
translating for. (Irish has a large number of plural forms and I can't 
always remember which corresponds to what. poedit does a nice thing 
here.) gettext provides no external API for this, it seems, and their 
internal stuff appears to handle things with bison. What do others think 
about this?

      * The Page Up and Page Down key bindings for next and previous 
messages interferes with normal behavior of those keys on the message 
table. I accidentally made a commit that killed those bindings (I 
removed them locally) so I think this is a good time to bring this up. 
Web browsers and various other applications make use of Alt+Left and 
Alt+Right to navigate between pages. This seems most intuitive to me but 
I'd like to see what others think about this.

   The other thing I'd like to see discussed is plans for release. As 
Nacho brought up previously, it seems like a good time to merge 
GOBJECT_WORK into trunk. Are there any plans to do anything more than 
maintenance and bugfix releases from trunk? If not, work on current 
stable could be done out of a branch and work on the next major version 
could be done in trunk. Beyond that, what is still missing from 
GOBJECT_WORK before an alpha can be released? We should take stock of 
what features are necessary and what needs to be done. We should comment 
out all unnecessary, unimplemented features in the UI and try to bring 
together something we can release for people to use. My personal list:

      * We need to track when a file has been modified and take 
appropriate action.
      * PO headers should be properly written on save. This includes 
the PO revision date, as this isn't currently set when we save.
      * GConf keys need to be cleaned up and an up-to-date schema written.
      * We should try to get our hands on a new icon. The current one 
doesn't scale well and doesn't seem to indicate "translation tool" to 
me. I see that someone made a Tango-styled one some time ago but it has 
the same metaphor as the current one and I'm not sure I like the 
all-purple color scheme. We could probably ask the Tango guys for a new 
icon.

   That's about all I can think of for the time being. I apologize for 
the exceedingly long email and I thank anyone with the patience to read 
and respond to it. A lot of good work is going into gtranslator, for 
which I thank you guys. I hope my own contributions have been useful and 
that I haven't stepped on anyone's toes.


Seán de Búrca