l10n approach for bzr

[Robert Collins]

On Mon, 2008-03-17 at 19:07 -0500, Mark Hammond wrote:
> > On Mon, 2008-03-17 at 15:56 -0500, Mark Hammond wrote:
> > > 
> > > 
> > > > So fairly long winded, but my view is that we should use English 
> > > > strings for the message ids, and that when the locale is 
> > English we 
> > > > shouldn't need any translating. Which means that when strings are 
> > > > cleaned up, they will get new message ids.
> > > 
> > > From a practical POV, when someone makes a change to the English 
> > > version of a string, should we ask them to locate that 
> > string in *all* 
> > > translations and remove them, to make it clear the 
> > translation is no 
> > > longer used?
> > 
> > No. Launchpad translations for the win. Previously known as 
> > rosetta, this was the first part of launchpad to be take out 
> > of beta, and is very capable of handling this.
> > 
> > In gettext you have a single master concordance of strings, 
> > and whent hat is update the change is propogated to the 
> > language specific translations.
> 
> I'm afraid I don't quite understand what that means.  You mean that I can
> freely change any literal string in the sourcecode and take no further
> action, and launchpad will magically ensure the "right-thing" (tm) happens
> with existing translations?  If so, that is wonderful and I don't even need
> to know what magic makes that work.  If that isn't quite correct, I clearly
> need further education...

Within limits yes.

If the string is close enough to the old one, prior translations are
offered as a fuzzy translation; these are noted as not being vetted yet,
and the translators will look at them and correct them. If the new
string is very different - then its basically a delete+add operation
anyhow.

-Rob
-- 
GPG key available at: <http://www.robertcollins.net/keys.txt>.
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