On coordinating translations of debina-edu-doc: some thoughts
Hi,
After being in charge of merging debian-edu-doc translation updates
from weblate into salsa, I want to share some observations.
1. Concurrent but different translation updates on both weblate and
salsa are difficult to manage.
So I propose that languages that use salsa for translation updates
should be deactivated at weblate, and that languages that were using
weblate and are willing to switch to salsa should do this only after
having announced this on the mailing list before doing so: this would
give the opportunity to Mike (or me) to commit the final updates from
weblate and to deactivate the language at weblate before new updates
arrive via salsa.
2. The hosted.weblate tool is conceived in the first place to promote
and facilitate the translation of user messages of programs (rather
than manuals).
In order to avoid conflicts, it expects a program developer to apply
the following steps (that weblate can partly automate on his behalf if
he wishes so):
- pulling in all pending translations from weblate.
- temporarily locking the weblate git repo.
- updating his template file (xgettext -j)
- merging the new pot with existing translations (msgmerge)
- merging these updates into the weblate git repo.
- unlocking the weblate git repo.
Applied to debian-edu-doc this would mean:
- pulling in all pending translations from weblate.
- temporarily locking the weblate git repo.
- updating debian-edu-doc from the wiki
- applying msgmerge to existing translations
- merging these translations with an updated pot into the weblate git
repo.
- unlocking the weblate git repo.
Nowadays I see debian-edu-doc updates from the wiki happen with
irregular time intervals and see them happen unannounced. In most cases
at that moment unapplied translations are te be found on
hosted.weblate. This would result in merge conflicts when one would try
to merge in the salsa updates into weblate.
And they regularly did, namely each time I had failed to notice that
such an update from the wiki had occurred.
In such a case one has to
- merge the new pot and the current weblate translations outside the
weblate environment
- commit the so merged translations to salsa
- reset from within weblate all changes made to the local weblate
repository
- pull into weblate all translations from salsa.
This is in my opinion a rather tedious and inelegant workflow.
So I would prefer if we could come to a coordinated workflow (see above
under "Applied to debian-edu-doc this would mean....") between salsa
and weblate, e.g. once a week at a given time.
Comments and criticism welcome :-)
--
Kind regards,
Frans Spiesschaert
Reply to: