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Re: [RANT] French translation for debconf templates stucked at 90% : analysis



On Sun, Jun 27, 2004 at 01:05:13PM +0200, Nicolas Bertolissio wrote:
> Le dimanche 27 juin 2004, Marco d'Itri ?crit :
> > On Jun 27, Christian Perrier <bubulle@debian.org> wrote:
> > 
> > >  Some of you guys take care of them...and after a few days upload a new
> > >  version with the updated templates. Thanks to you, you're by chance
> > >  the majority.
> > I do not think this is a good thing. Packages with updated templates
> > should be uploaded in time for the release, but IMO doing a new upload
> > only because of the translations wastes bandwith and buildds time.
> 
> This is because you do this the wrong way, you should ask translators
> from your templates to update their translations _before_ uploading,
> this can be done winthin 3 / 4 days with translation being proofread by
> the translation team.

If I've got twelve languages translated in my package (not that I do, I
think I've maxed two, I just picked the number at semi-random), it starts to
get rather annoying to look in twelve .po files for the Language-Team and
send the new version of my POT (and, if I recall correctly, the old .po) to
them all.  A script (maybe in devscripts or something), well-publicised (ie
mentioning it prominently in the initial bug report e-mails), which will do
this work automatically, would encourage maintainers to report updated
translations.

What would be even better would be a pre-packaged version of the little
fragment that was floating around a while ago to check out of date
translations:

#!/bin/sh

for i in debian/po/*.po; do
        echo $i
        msgfmt -o /dev/null --statistics $i
done

with added functionality to send the updated POT to the fuzzied teams,
probably along with the old one and whatever else might be useful.  The
script could then warn the maintainer that N translations were out of date,
that the relevant data has been sent to the translation teams, and to wait a
certain amount of time before uploading to collect new translations.

Getting checks put into the relevant places (lintian and linda come to mind
immediately) to check for outdated translations and warn the maintainer to
run the po-update script before release, and the associated other things.  I
think lintian might already warn about fuzzy translations -- but, again,
it's been too long for me to remember that reliably.

Most maintainers (I think) don't *want* to screw up translators, but since
translation doesn't get changed that often (relatively speaking), it tends
to swap out.  For instance, I can't remember exactly what has to be sent to
translators.  I also don't always remember to run pocheck over my packages
before upload, and there's often long-term jumps between changes in a
package in preparation for an upload.

- Matt



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