Glade-3 in packs?

[Djihed Afifi]

Hi Danilo, Martin, Carlos:


Thanks for the explanations. I always lumped LP and ubuntu in the same
boat as one entity, so it's good to know about the practical issues
seperating them.  

In essense I am very glad that this is being taken care of :-)

Djihed


في ر، 28-11-2007 عند 11:10 +0100 ، كتب Danilo Šegan:
> Hi Djihed,
> 
> Today at 10:03, Djihed Afifi wrote:
> 
> >> 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).
> >
> > What's technically hard about compiling existing .po files from
> > upstream?
> > You don't need the original .pot files for that.
> 
> That's something Ubuntu packagers have to deal with, if they want that.
> I can imagine why they may not want to do it, though (i.e. special
> casing for a handful of packages: it's ugly, not hard; it's easier to
> fix those few packages which have the problem by hand; etc).  FWIW,
> that's what is currently being done for 'universe' packages.
> 
> You may talk to Martin Pitt (CCed) about what he thinks of it
> (i.e. maybe not run 'strip-translations' when no .pot file can be
> found in the tarball).  However, that will make it harder for us to
> track down problems like this (though, this is easily solveable: just
> report a bug for the package once this is done), and I still think
> it's more valuable to provide updated language packs.
> 
> What I was talking about a technically hard problem is constructing a
> POT file when one doesn't exist.  As far as LP is concerned, that's
> exactly the case, and we require POT file to ensure at least some
> level of correctness.  We have an idea how to solve that, which would
> be equivalent to just "compiling existing .po files", but we don't
> like it for the reasons I mentioned.
> 
> >> 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). 
> >
> > I meant - Since Launchpad and the language packs can't get the glade-3
> > catalog* - or any other package which can't build them, just roll the
> > translations with the package itself. 
> 
> Yeah, that's doable, but would have to be done on the Ubuntu side of
> things.  I don't know much about it, but I've CCed Martin.
> 
> >>  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
> >
> > No, it isn't. It's not better than a distribution that just rolls
> > everything with their original packages, and does no language packs.
> 
> Have you never been late to provide updated GNOME translations by a
> few days (i.e. a maintainer rolls out a tarball 3 days before the
> deadline, and you do the update after that)?  I am pretty sure you
> were, and if you want your translations in your distribution, you need
> to wait for the next major GNOME update in it.  With Ubuntu, you just
> go to Launchpad, upload your translations, and wait for the language
> pack.
> 
> > Sure that option may have drawbacks like bandwidth, but omitting whole
> > existing translations is not one of them.
> >
> > <I'm an ubuntu user btw>
> >
> >> 
> >> > Not the right decision I believe.
> >> 
> >> It's technically very hard to do anything else properly.
> >
> > Again, what's technically hard about rolling translations with their
> > original package?
> 
> We can solve this either on the LP level, or on the Ubuntu level.
> I was talking from LP point-of-view.  From Ubuntu POV, it's not up to
> me to say how difficult it would be, since I am not going to be the
> one doing the work :)
> 
> >> 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.
> >
> > Either way, it is because of the bureuacracy in the middle. Bureaucracy
> > can't handle them? just roll it the old fashioned way!
> >
> > (I'm repeating myself here)
> 
> This may require more effort than just fixing a package, though.
> 
> >> 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?
> >
> > If I am an end-user, I don't want to translate a package, my priority is
> > to get it. If I decide to translate a package, well in the case of
> > Glade-3, I do as I did and go spend hours on the upstream package to
> > translate it.
> 
> And we want to make Launchpad a way to find faster how to contribute
> to translations anywhere.  Glade-3 is a special case for you, since
> you are Arabic GNOME translation team leader, and Glade-3 is
> translated in GNOME Subversion.  But there are other use-cases as
> well (like, you are Arabic translator and run into software which you
> don't know where to go and translate).  I am not saying Launchpad is
> solving them or solving them perfectly yet, but that's where we want
> to be.
> 
> > And then sit and wait for ubuntu to deliver them and wonder where my
> > work has gone.
> 
> Reporting a bug was the right thing to do.  Bugs happen.  How many
> other translations have you not seen in Ubuntu because of this?  If
> this is the first time you've hit this bug, I'd say it's not a big
> problem (and I know you've been translating GNOME for a few years
> already, and you've contributed a lot of translations).  It might be a
> problem that nobody caught this during Ubuntu pre-release testing, but
> I guess there are not enough Ubuntu Arabic translators testing Ubuntu
> (and Ubuntu mostly a community-driven distribution).
> 
> We may disagree on the value of the Ubuntu/Launchpad approach to
> translations, but I am pretty confident this one is not such a big
> issue: only few packages have the problem, and they are easily fixed.
> 
> Cheers,
> Danilo
-- 
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