Question about automatic Import and export

[Francesco Fumanti]

Hi David,

Thanks for your replies.

On 19/06/12 11:24, David Planella wrote:
> Al 19/06/12 11:21, En/na David Planella ha escrit:
>> Al 16/06/12 14:42, En/na Francesco Fumanti ha escrit:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> As you probably know, Onboard is the default onscreen keyboard shipping
>>> with Ubuntu, and thus, it is included in main. Moreover, upstream
>>> Onboard is hosted on launchpad and uses the Ubuntu Translators for its
>>> translation with the policy set to structured.
>>>
>>> The synchronisation settings are currently the following for trunk:
>>> - Import is set to only import the pot file
>>> - Automatic export is set to do the export to a different branch,
>>> created especially for the export
>>>
>>> I am considering now to change the Import settings to import the pot
>>> files and the po files; and to change the the automatic export to commit
>>> the files into trunk instead of committing them to the separate branch.
>>
>> Hi Francesco,
>>
>> Sorry for the delay in replying, I hadn't noticed your e-mail in the
>> moderation queue.
>>
>> In general, I would discourage setting up imports of PO files. Rather,
>> I'd keep only importing POT files.
>>
>> I'm assuming your intention is to allow PO file commits in trunk. I
>> would much rather recommend leaving translators do their work and do the
>> translations only on the web UI. They can choose if they want to do
>> online or offline translations (and then upload them), but the work and
>> the ability to modify translations should be best left to them, as they
>> are the people who know the language and their particular translation
>> guidelines best.

These last months, several bugs were filed about translation files breaking Onboard. Thus, the main Onboard developer created a procedure to test the translation files for errors. Thus, I wondered whether it would not be more simple to correct these errors directly in the source code repository and have launchpad pick them up, instead of doing it in web UI of launchpad.

> I've just noticed that what I wrote might sound misleading. I think
> you're making the right decision with automatic imports and exports, but
> I'd just suggest to change your original plan to keep importing the POT
> file only. In short, here's my recommendation:
>
> - Import is set to only import the pot file
> - Automatic export is set to do the export to trunk

Since web UI translations and imports can overwrite each other, it might be better to follow your recommendations. I will talk to the other Onboard developers and to see what they say.

>>> However, I have a question about this:
>>>
>>> Assuming, we modify a translation in a po file of Onboard in the source
>>> code repository, and somebody else changes a translation in the
>>> translation interface of Launchpad. How do I know, that the import
>>> triggered by our change in the source code repository does not overwrite
>>> the change in the translation interface, or that the export triggered by
>>> the change in the translation interface of launchpad does not overwrite
>>> our change in the source code repository? Does the import and export
>>> take such concurrent changes into account or does it blindly overwrite
>>> the one or the other?
>>>
>>
>> It depends on the order translations happen. Either imports or web UI
>> translations can overwrite each other:
>>
>> * Translations done in the web UI are committed once a day, some time in
>> the morning (CET). If there has been a change in a translation through
>> the web UI, those changes will be written to the corresponding PO file,
>> overwriting its contents.
>>
>> * Translations committed to bzr are imported regularly (as a rule of
>> thumb every 20 minutes after a commit to the PO or POT files). They will
>> overwrite web UI translations and demote the previous strings to
>> suggestions.
>>
>> So my recommendation, in order to keep things simple, would be to just
>> import POT files and let translators only submit translations through
>> the web UI, either using the Launchpad translation interface, or
>> uploading PO files through Launchpad.

I suppose that by "uploading the PO files through launchpad", you mean the "Manual Synchronisation" feature of launchpad!? For example:
https://translations.launchpad.net/onboard/trunk/+translations-upload

Cheers,

Francesco