Glade-3 in packs?

[Danilo Šegan]

Hi Djihed,

Yesterday at 15:05, Djihed Afifi wrote:

> I don't think your decision is sound though. So because it doesn't do
> what launchpad expects it to do, you just drop its translations from
> packages?

It's not our decision: it's a technically hard problem.  The only
assumption we make is that packages will contain proper POT and PO
files.  If that doesn't happen, it's easier to fix it in a package,
than to try to construct a reasonable POT from all the PO files
(i.e. you may end up with too many messages for translation which are
obsolete, thus making translators do unneeded work, you may have
conflicting messages in different PO files, etc).

We did discuss something like this:

  https://blueprints.launchpad.net/rosetta/+spec/autogenerate-missing-templates-in-packages

Anyway, we have not yet dedicated to working on this, simply because
of the above reasons.

> What happens to an ordinary person building the package from tarball
> sources, do they lose translations?

No, but I probably miss your point.  What they, however, do lose is
the ability to get updates with future language pack updates (the plan
for Gutsy is to issue them monthly).  Ubuntu is so far the best
distribution when it comes to propagating translator work to their
users (imo, though there's a lot to improve still), and that's solely
due to Launchpad/Ubuntu

> Not the right decision I believe.

It's technically very hard to do anything else properly.

> At this time, I'm wondering how many other packages are dropping
> translations because of Launchpad.

Not too many, we've had a few (I remember one other from the last 5-6
months) bug reports like this.

Anyway, this is not because of Launchpad, this is because we're
providing language packs for Ubuntu, and want to make sure that some
data is at least correct.  Launchpad itself works for much more than
just intltool-enabled modules, so it can't regenerate POT files in the
way damned-lies (on l10n.gnome.org) does.

And, fwiw, this might as well be broken behaviour in upstream Glade3:
i.e. standard intltool build rules always create a POT file and put it
in a tarball.  There's a lot of sense in that, and not least of them:
how would you start translating a package if it comes with no POT?

Anyway, a short-term solution is to fix the package.

Cheers,
Danilo