Re: keywords in desktop files, again

[Andre Klapper <ak-47 gmx net>]

Stealing Matthias' email from gnome-i18n and replying on r-t:

On Fri, 2013-03-22 at 10:24 -0400, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> I sent a mail about this in January already[1], but we are still
> seeing a steady stream of broken syntax in translations for the
> Keywords field in desktop files. Please, try to educate your fellow
> translators about this issue, it is really making building GNOME
> package updates cumbersome, since the desktop-file-validate call in
> the spec file is normally the first place where this breakage becomes
> apparent.
> [1] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-i18n/2013-January/msg00030.html

In hindsight we all know better, so I've added some recommendations:
https://live.gnome.org/action/info/GnomeGoals/DesktopFileKeywords?action=diff&rev2=93&rev1=92

When we started introducing keywords we should have required maintainers
to add translator comments to all *.desktop.in.in files, explaining to
keep unlocalized semicolons and to end the list with a semicolon,
instead of relying on "spreading the word" among translators.

Whatever future Gnome Goals anybody will come up with, it's not hard to
do way better next time and avoid screwups of such extent. (I'm mostly
angry at myself that I didn't intervene at some earlier point.)

Wondering whether to issue a call to maintainers to add translator
comments (as described now on the wikipage linked above), for future
translations (otherwise I expect the same problems for 3.10).
Plus to apologize to our hard-working translators for not making it
clear *in the po files instead of some mailing list* how to do the
translation correctly.

andre
-- 
Andre Klapper  |  ak-47 gmx net
http://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/