Your feedback on Launchpad

[Erdal Ronahi]

Hi,

On 12/20/06, Matthew Revell <matthew.revell at canonical.com> wrote:
> If you, or any of your loco team, are a regular Launchpad user and would
> like to join the panel, please email me. Let me know:
>
> - what you use Launchpad for
> - what you most like about Launchpad
> - what you most dislike about Launchpad.

I'm glad you asked ;)

The Kurdish team makes intensive use of Rosetta, as you can see we
have far more translations in Launchpad than upstream. Launchpad has
been our primary translation tool so far (rather than pootle, eg.),
mainly because of one killer feature: Rosetta makes suggestions in a
third language different from English, in our case Turkish, Arabic, or
German. This enables users who know a third language better than
English to contribute effectively and helped us to enlarge our team.

Another beloved feature are the suggestions "used elsewhere:" and
"suggested elsewhere:", which are really helpful.

Obviously we have also had some trouble with Rosetta:

- It is damned slow and fails very, very often. It fails so often that
I have stopped sending bugreports or complaining on the mailinglists.
- The import of our OpenOffice.org translation into Ubuntu largely
failed, although (or because?) we did it entirely in Rosetta. The
Windows build (from the po files we exported from Rosetta) is much
better now that the Ubuntu build, which is a shame!

And because Christmas is closing in, we have also a wishlist:

- A search feature. Search in one package or search language-wide.
This would be very useful to correct a particular translation in a lot
of files at once if we decide to change it globally.

- A DIRECT link to the translations listed under "used elsewhere:". If
I see a mistake there I do not want to click myself through 80 damned
slow pages to correct one typo. This also applies to the search
feature: the results should link to the translation itself, not only
to the package.

- An option to enable more than 10 translations on a page. I can do
that manually (with &batch=20 for instance), but it raises the failure
risk (see above).

- Tag the packages with things like "GNOME", "KDE", "XFCE" like in the
application installer in GNOME. If you do not know all the package
names it is difficult to find, say, all KDE packages

- Make it easier to find a specific package from a "Rosetta start
page". Do you know how many steps it takes to find, say, ooo-writer in
Dapper? And after that KBabel in Edgy? Quite a few. My work around is
to have a link that will list me all packages in a distro, like this:
https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/edgy/+lang/ku/+index?batch=1070
After that I search for the name in the browser.

- Make the whole contribution list more wiki(pedia)-like. It would be
very helpful not only to track back the translations of a certain
user, but also to have a direct link to each single translation. Then
we could give new contributors more permissions without having to fear
never to find their mistakes.

- Sync more often with upstream. I know that is difficult and causes a
lot of trouble, but maybe the trouble can be overcome.

- Make the whole stuff free software, at least Rosetta. I know the
argument "It is difficult to cut it out of the whole thing, but if you
know Python come and do it". But I don't buy it anymore. It should
work the other way round: Open source it, and someone will help with
that.

These are the things that came to my mind immediately. I maye have
more ideas in the future and certainly want to help improve Rosetta,
which has made our Kurdish translation effort so effective.

Regards,
Erdal