Question about automatic Import and export

[Jeroen Vermeulen]

On 2012-06-16 19:42, Francesco Fumanti wrote:

> 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?

Disclaimer: it's been a while since I did any serious work on this, so I 
may get some things wrong.  And it's complicated, so there's always 
things that can go wrong.  That said, it seems to work out pretty well 
in practice.  Here's what I think happens:

The daily automatic export job will notice that there are concurrent 
changes, and just skip the export for that day.  This doesn't quite 
cover all possible conflicts, but that's where the importer's conflict 
resolution comes in.

If you take a PO file that was exported from Launchpad Translations, 
edit it offline, and then re-upload it, there will be a timestamp in the 
header saying when it was exported from Launchpad.  If the importer sees 
that one of the translations has already changed in Launchpad since the 
file was exported, it will downgrade the file's translation of that 
message to a suggestion.


Jeroen