[D-I] [IMPORTANT] New handling of translations in the sarge branch
This is an important message for translators. This is also important
for the core D-I team, I guess.
After several days of testing, I have established what seems to be the
"best" way to handle updates of translations in the sarge branch of
Debian Installer repository, for the following goals:
-keep everything simple for translators (THE MOST IMPORTANT)
-keep languages supported in sarge to 100%
-possibly bring to 100% in sarge the four languages which were below 100% at
RC3 release (Bosnian, Galician, Persian and Latvian)
-bring fixes (typo, spelling...) made in trunk to the strings in sarge
with no action required by translators
Below are details about things which will change.
Updates by translators:
-----------------------
For all languages except Arabic, Dutch, Portuguese (not Brazilian),
updates SHOULD ONLY GO TO TRUNK. Commiting in sarge will be useless
(but harmless) with one exception (see below).
It will be the responsibility of automated sarge update scripts to
spread changes made in trunk to relevant strings in sarge.
For Arabic, Dutch and Portuguese, unless these languages switch to the
use of a master file, the translation teams will have to update PO
files in the sarge branch if they want to see them appear. I will not
force these teams to switch as I intend to respect their work methods
(Ossama, I think however that, given the work method of Arabeyes,
using a master file now would be better).
EXCEPTION: when a string is present in sarge and no
more in trunk (usually when it will have been changed in trunk). I
will track down such strings and notify translators. A record of them
will be kept in sarge/packages/po in a file named "not-in-trunk.txt"
(I'm thinking about better methods). There is currently NO SUCH
STRING.
Updates by D-I team:
--------------------
Usually, merges to sarge are done by very few D-I team members, so it
shouldn't be a problem. We have concluded that you (Joey, Frans,
others) only need to merge changesets which do not include debian/po
changes. Doing so would be harmless....but would be overwritten by
further synchronisation scripts runs.
Synchronisation schedule:
-------------------------
trunk updates
-------------
The l10n-sync script will be run 4 times a day in trunk, at 03:27,
09:27 and 15:27 UTC ("quick run" with no debconf-updatepo in packages)
plus one "slow run" at 00:27 UTC which will include running
debconf-updatepo on all packages (in case a maintainer forgot to do
so).
It will be run from gluck.debian.org.
It may be controlled from the packages/po/run-l10n-sync file content.
sarge updates
-------------
Updates to the sarge branch will be a three-step operation:
1) msgcat --use-first trunk.po sarge.po >merged.po
2) msgmerge -U merged.po template.pot
3) l10n-sync in sarge
where, for each language, trunk.po is the file in the trunk branch,
sarge.po the one in the sarge branch and template.pot the templates
file from the sarge branch
That way, the sarge files will have the trunk translations for strings
which are in both branches and even the trunk translations (as
"obsolete" strings) which are not in sarge.
This operation will be done once a day at 21:27 UTC. I will run it
manually in the next days, just to see if everything is OK... A first
run occurred today (r26647 and r26648).
It will be run from gluck.debian.org.
It may be controlled from the packages/po/run-l10n-sync file content.
Prospective languages:
----------------------
No change will happen yet to the way we handle "prospective"
languages, ie languages which are not included in sarge releases.
The D-I team will discuss when it is appropriate to "open the gates"
in trunk.
Statistics:
-----------
The translation statistics pages will not change. They will still
reflect the statistics in translations in "individual" D-I packages
and thus will not reflect changes immediately but only after a few hours.
Documentation:
--------------
I will ASAP update installer/doc/i18n/i18n.xml with these new procedures.
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