Hi Jean-Michel!
Picking up where we left...
On Mon, 6 Jan 2014, Jean-Michel Philippe wrote:
It seems people are more encline to start improving translations
applications for DoudouLinux than for upstream projects directly. This
is quite logical since they clearly see the benefit: their children!
Also the problem with upstream projects is that they're using
independent repositories and processes. Transifex solves this by
providing a unique user account and a single access point.
Ideally, if all the projects were sharing the same translation
infrastructure, Transifex or another one, life could be easier for
everyone. The only missing feature in Transifex is the ability to share
a resource between projects, which would allow us to just symlink to
upstream translation projects instead of duplicating their messages.
Yes, I think something like Transifex would be very good to share between
upstream and DDL. But as you say Transifex is not a shared resource, so
although some upstream projects may use it, they have their own Transifex
project and there is no automatic syncinc. Which is too bad, because it would
be very convenient for sharing translations...
Take a look at lang/trunk/ on SVN. The script fetch-pofiles is supposed
to fetch and merge PO files from upstream, provided you give the URL in
a per-resource configuration file. I remember to have found it not so
satisfying, I don't remember exactly why. Maybe the merging operation
was more tricky than imagined.
I took a deeper look at the scripts. I think I now roughly understand how
things work with DoudouLinux translations.
The problem I see w.r.t. merging with Debian is that the DDL translations are
all bundled into a separate package, which then overrides message files and
other language-specific resources in the original Debian packages. For
example, the message file /usr/share/locale/fi/LC_MESSAGES/gcompris.mo is,
according to dpkg -S, originally present in gcompris-data, but overridden by
doudoulinux-l10n-fi-updates. There is thus no real integration with the
original deb package (gcompris-data in this case), so it is not entirely
trivial to create a patch against the original Debian source package.
I think I can understand why you have set up things this way, as it probably
makes translations much easier to manage than having to manipulate the
language files in each Debian source package separately and then recompiling
the full packages.
Now if we take the creation of patches against original Debian source
packages as a goal (as suggested recently on the debian-jr mailing list), I
think it can be achieved in two different ways:
1. Switch to a process where translations are maintained by modifying the
original source packages, which are then recompiled for DDL. Creating patches
for upstream Debian packages would then be trivial.
2. Keep the current model of doudoulinux-l10n-* packages, but write tools
that merge the DDL specific language files (.po etc) back into the Debian
packages so that patches can still be generated.
I think neither way is easy, but 1. might be entirely unrealistic?
There's also the problem of differing software versions in DDL / Debian sid /
upstream, which may create interesting merging issues, but I haven't thought
of that in detail. Also I have not looked closely at the merging capabilities
of Transifex, except that some details of the merging process seem
problematic from the point of view of having different versions of the
original software. If you push translations for an older software version
than what is currently in Transifex, some messages may be lost if you're not
careful. At least that's how I read the description of the --source argument
of transifex-client:
http://support.transifex.com/customer/portal/articles/996211-pushing-new-translations
What do you think?
-Osma
--
*** Osma Suominen / Osuuskunta Sange *** osma.suominen@sange.fi ***
*** PL 197, 00131 Helsinki *** 040 - 5255 882 ***
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