Rosetta legal questions

On Wed, 2005-11-23 at 21:36 +0100, Jordi Mallach wrote:
> Hello Barry!
> It's been a long time since we last "met" on the Internet :)

Hi Jordi!

> Thanks for the interest. I every now and then think about mailman
> translations, due to the awful state of Catalan and my lack of time to
> do anything about it :)

Trust me, I know how that goes.  One of my goals for the rest of the
year is to improve Mailman's project management so more people can
contribute.  Rosetta seems like a good way to get more people involved
in the translation efforts, so it's not so dependent on one person's
level of availability.

> Translations made in Rosetta are released under the same licence as the
> upstream code, so your translations would be under the GPL.

Great!

> Rosetta doesn't provide any interface to handle the signing of
> translation disclaimers, but I have an idea of what we can do:
> 
> We can create a GNU Translators group, and assign mailman and any other
> GNU packages that choose to use Rosetta in the future. Only people that
> have translation disclaimers sent to the FSF would be able to join these
> teams, and in consequence translate Mailman. See the "legal" link in
> Rosetta for the exact terms.

This sounds like a great idea.  The nice thing is that people could sign
a blanket disclaimer, which would help not just Mailman, but all GNU
projects.

> I see another problem, which might have been solved since I last looked
> at mailman translations. Two years ago or so, we had two different kind
> of files to translate: 1) the po files for the strings in the python
> code, and 2) the email templates mailman sends in many situations.
> 
> As Rosetta only handles PO files, we'd need to find a way to convert the
> text templates to gettext format prior to their import, and another way
> to get them back to normal format.

You make a good point, and unfortunately, that's still the case with
Mailman 2.1.  I don't know that we can change that until Mailman 2.2 at
the very least, although it's a very important goal for Mailman 3.

> It shouldn't be too difficult to get this done, if isn't already. Maybe
> po4a has something that can help.  Even if you didn't use Rosetta, I'm
> sure many translators would be _glad_ to see all the translatable stuff
> in po files only, and not arbitrary extra formats :)

Oh trust me, I would too!  It's a source of bugs that we don't have one
set of templates for all languages, with the translatable parts living
in po files.  I'll bring that up on the mailman-i18n mailing list --
maybe someone has a good idea for helping with that.

I'd never heard of po4a before, but I did a quick search and found the
pages for it.  I don't know whether it will help us, but I'd be happy to
use it if it could.

> Many thanks for your interest, Barry.
> I will be glad to see mailman jump into Rosetta!

Thanks for your responses Jordi!
-Barry

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