Some Kubuntu translations love

[Arne Goetje]

David Planella wrote:

> Arne Goetje, Ubuntu i18n/l10n Engineer, member of the UTC team (and
> temporary Ubuntu Translations Coordinator in the past) will send a
> follow up e-mail to this thread with the technical details.

Hi all,

we will probably be ready to open translations for Karmic
sometime this or next week and we'd like to work with the Kubuntu
community to make sure translations are in good shape for the new release.

Due to technical differences, KDE translations and their templates
currently require some manual work to get them in the right places in
Launchpad.

As you might know already, there are three things we need to know for
each translation template:
1. which source package is it belonging to?
2. the translation domain (i.e. the filename of the actual .po/.pot file)
3. the template name in Launchpad (usually the same as the translation
domain, with '_' replaced by '-')

In the past we could not detect some of the changes in KDE translations
(e.g. translation templates moved around, removed, added or renamed) in
Launchpad, which lead to some translations missing for the end user.

Now, whenever these changes happen, we need to apply them to Launchpad
manually, i.e. move templates over to other source packages, rename
templates, approve new templates and disable obsolete ones. This is done
by the Ubuntu Translation Coordinators team (subscribed to this thread).

The Ubuntu Translation Coordinators are team of community members
experienced with translation and i18n which would also welcome anyone
from the Kubuntu community to help us with your experience on KDE
translations.

However, we don't have any notification system in place, which notifies
us of such changes. That's why we had all these problems with Kubuntu
translations in the past.

On the last UDS we have discussed with some Kubuntu developers what
needs to be done in order to improve this situation.
Basically, we need to be notified whenever you make an upload that
affects translation templates (e.g. a minor version upgrade from 4.2.90
to 4.2.91). Also, we would need a list of those template changes.

It would be nice to have some scripting in place which automates this
notification somehow. However, I don't understand all aspects of how KDE
translations work, so it's difficult for me to give suggestions.

What we need is a list containing the source package name and
the .pot or .po filenames for each source package.

Now, if I download the source package for kde-l10n-de for example, it
contains a lot of subdirectories, one for each project, I suppose, which
contain the .po files for German in this case. Each .po file carries the
translation domain in its filename.

When I download the source package of, let's say, kde4libs, it contains
a Messages.sh script, which is supposed to generate the .pot files on
build time if I'm not mistaken.

(Somehow I fail to build both source packages on my local machine, so I
cannot see what is actually happening.)

What I still don't understand is the relationship between those two
packages. In the kde-l10n-de package, the translations for kde4libs are
actually in the directory called 'kdelibs'. This suggests me that the
directory name does not necessarily match the source package name in
Kubuntu... so, how is this mapping done?

So, what we need is a list like:

#source_pkg	#translation_domain
kde4libs	kdelibs4
kde4libs	kdelibs_colors
...

We would need this list for every KDE upload, means the lists should be
versioned.

For the upcoming Karmic translation opening (hopefully next week), we
would need this list for the latest release in Jaunty (4.2.2) and for
the current one in Karmic (4.2.90). Then we can produce a diff and can
see what has changed.

We would then need to find out what happened to those templates, which
have changed between those two releases.
 * Is it a new template?
 * Has it been renamed from another name in the older release?
 * Has it moved across source packages?
 * What happened to those templates which were in the old release but
are missing in the new one? Have they been obsoleted, renamed or moved?

I don't know how things work on the Kubuntu-devel side... so, I cannot
give any scripting advice. Maybe those template movements can be tracked
in the svn changelog?

For notifying us and also for genral translation related bug reports, we
have created a new project in Launchpad with a bugtracker attached:
https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu-translations

So, you could submit a new bug, like "[karmic] KDE 4.2.90 uploaded with
template changes" and a list of the changes attached to the bug report.
The list of changes should be versioned, so that we know which uploads
you are comparing (e.g. "changes_4.2.2_4.2.90")

Format idea for the changes list:
 * Categories [New], [Moved], [Renamed], [Removed]
 * 'diff' like +/- indicates old and new names
 * 2 columns: source package name and translation domain (.pot filename
without '.pot'), separated by TAB

[New]
+kde4libs	foo
+kde4libs	bar
+phonon	baz

[Moved]
-kde4libs	template1
+phonon	template1

[Renamed]
-kde4libs	template2
+kde4libs	template2-extras

[Removed]
-phonon	template3

Of course we'd like to automate as much as possible, so, it would be
nice if the changes list is also parseable. :)

Please feel free to discuss anything here, if you have better ideas,
please let us know. :)

I will get a list of the current templates we have in Launchpad and I'd
like to ask you to review the list and tell us which templates to keep,
which ones to disable and which ones to rename or move.

Thanks a lot!

Cheers
Arne
(Ubuntu i18n/l10n engineer)