What is an Upstream?

[Danilo Šegan]

Hi Sebastian,

Yesterday at 17:58, Sebastian Heinlein wrote:

> Can you provide a "rough" time schedule? I don't know if the closed
> nature of Rosetta is the problem, but I have got the feeling that the
> development happens behind closed doors. It would be very helpful for us
> users to have some rough time schedules.

I know we haven't been best at letting the community know what
happens, so we'll try to improve that.  At any rate, don't ever
hesitate to approach Carlos or me personally and ask about any Rosetta
stuff you want.

Though, most things are going on in the open: stuff is discussed in
public #launchpad channel, all bugs are there in
launchpad.net/products/rosetta (and you can look for "in progress"
bugs to see what's going on at the moment), and you can tune in to our
weekly Launchpad developers meeting (which is completely open to
public, on Thursdays at 12UTC, #launchpad on FreeNode), where you can
see the weekly Rosetta progress report.

> It will be ok to use workarounds if you know that the situation will be
> addressed until a specific date. Currently many translators are
> discouraged by the fact that Rosetta is a "dead end". As a Canonical
> employee it maybe ok to say that Rosetta was (primary) made for
> translating Ubuntu, But this attitude doesn't help making Rosetta
> attractive to translators who would like to see the maximum benefits of
> their donated working hours.

I can't give a specific timeframe for what you've asked, but I can say
that we've got our priorities set on the following things at the
moment:

 1. re-enable po import
 2. improved translation review interface
 3. firefox native support
 4. openoffice.org native support
 5. kde plural forms support
 6. search

So, we're going to add "big" tasks to our schedule only when we're
done with most of these (since there's always a lot of bug-fixing
going on at the same time).

Also, note that outside code contributions to Rosetta are as welcome,
but they would require you to sign NDA before getting code access.

>> About message reordering, we don't do a 'random' order, we follow what
>> the .pot file has, just the same way gettext's msgmerge does. If
>> that's
>> not true, it's a bug. 
>
> Perhaps it was a bug. I tried to provide some diffs for GNOME upstream
> and had to recognize, that the messages had a different order. But it
> was some months ago.

Well, PO files are not really "diff-able", even if they are plain text
files.  They contain a lot of metadata which is not important to
translator, and that usually pollutes the diff output (things like
source *line* reference changing by 1 would make a big diff, even if
no translation has changed; message order change might be simply
because someone reordered POTFILES.in in upstream GNOME package, etc.).

> By the way, do you know when we will get back po import?

It's one of our top priorities, and Carlos is doing the final tests
for this to 'land'.

> Is there another possibility to use translation from one tree (e.g.
> edgy) for another one (e.g. dapper)? We completed the translation of the
> Ubuntu desktop guide in edgy and would like to reuse the translation as
> far as possible for the dapper book.

At the moment, you'd have to go with workaround for this one as well:
download a PO file for edgy book, and upload it as a translation for
dapper book.  We also plan to implement better support for sharing
translation between related 'modules':

  https://blueprints.launchpad.net/products/rosetta/+spec/multicast-translations

Cheers,
Danilo