Current Intrepid translation issues page

[Danilo Šegan]

Hi Gabor,

У пет, 07. 11 2008. у 11:29 +0100, Gabor Kelemen пише:
> Jeroen Vermeulen írta:
> > Gabor Kelemen wrote:
> > 
> >> I understand that, but
> >> -the problem still exists
> >> -then it should be solved some other way: how about grabbing the
> >> translations exported for language packs, putting them back into the
> >> last sources and recompiling only with this change?
> > 
> > That's still a pretty long feedback cycle!  You're talking about days at
> > minimum, probably much longer before a newly translated message can make
> > it back in. 
> 
> Yes, but this is not really a matter, because of the relatively small
> number of affected strings and changes. It's fine if this occurs only a
> few times (< 3) in a whole release cycle, and one last time right
> before the langpack freeze. Or only one time, after non-langpack freeze.
> Just make it happen _at all_, that's all I want.

Interestingly enough, I've discussed this around a week or so ago with
Celso Providelo, our Soyuz guru. It seems we should be able to export a
tarball and use those translations while building packages, meaning that
"static" content will get updated translations on every package rebuild.

This is far from perfect (i.e. we won't be able to fix translations with
new language packs), but it's much, much better than what we have now.

It will take a few months before we can actually implement this.

> > Most of this involves how the packages are built (just
> > outside my daily field of view, so I can't say much about it), but you
> > mention server and developer time and obviously those are limited.  
> 
> Where should I show up with this request then?
> I admit that this needs both developer and server time, bad luck, but
> IMHO this is just necessary to use LP translations with the distribution
> properly. No, doing only the easiest 97% of the job is not enough :P.

This should get us to 98.5% :)

Anyway, I've long ago considered appropriate "correct" solutions, but
they would also have their own drawbacks.  I.e. I've written an intltool
patch to use MO files to "remerge" translations, but that means that all
static files would have to be rebuilt on language pack installation, and
that would literally take ages. Of course, one can make dependency
chains there as well, but that increases complexity.

Also, no Ubuntu packagers were ever interested enough in actively
pursing this, and I have no idea about packaging to be able to do it
myself (at least not in a proper way).

Cheers,
Danilo