Tool for maintainers to notify debconf translators when a template is modified?
(at least I finally subscribed to this list)
The ideas below are thrown up for discussion. They are not very
formalised and they mostly come from my experience of
debconf/po-debconf with my own packages and other DD packages (for
french translation and/or switch to po-debconf).
The rising of po-debconf is a great step for debconf templates
l10n. We now have, in the packages, the information about who
translated files and when this occurred.
So, now we could imagine a tool for helping maintainers in keeping
their packages up-to-date, including translations.
Currently, when a maintainer modifies/adds a debconf templates and
runs debconf-updatepo (which is run anyway by dh_installdebconf),
there is no simple way for him to warn the translators that the
translations probably need an update (fuzzy and/or untranslated strings).
For sure, (s)he may upload the new version and then wait for updates,
if translators regularly check the po-debconf status pages :
http://www.debian.org/intl/l10n/po-debconf/
But these pages are certainly not monitored by all translators (I do
so for the french team and then warn translators when one of their
translations needs an update)....
Moreover, this will require an additionnal update when the translators
send their new PO files.....
As maintainer, I thus keep a small list of all people who did
translations of "my" debconf templates and then drop them a mail
whenever I update the master templates.
Not that complicated, but this is a manual task.....and DD *hate*
manual tasks, don't they ? :-). Moreover, I do so because I'm somewhat
deeply concerned by i18n, but I doubt every maintainer will do the
same.. :-)
I was thus thinking about a new small tool, probably included in
po-debconf (I first dropped a mail to debian-l10n-french about this
and Denis is aware of it). This tool could be used either manually by
the package maintainer or semi-automatically (called from
debconf-updatepo) for sending a mail to the "Last-Translator",
indicating the status of his/her translation, with, optionnally the
new xx_yy.po file attached.
As many people are very fast for thinking that automatical
mail-sending tools are offensive (remember the flames when Grisu
launched the DDTP notifications), a system for keeping a list of
translators who do not wish to be warned is probably needed.
(this makes the system an "opt-out" system.... I personnaly think that
as translators have put their mail address in the po files, they
already choose to have some interaction withthe maintainer...)
As I said, these ideas are not closed up....I just bring up the
discussion where it belongs....feel free to comment/flame.. :-)
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