Please find below an attempt to summarize the interesting sessions we had in Edinburgh this year. Many thanks to Michael Bramer, Felipe Augusto van de Wiel and Eddy Petrisor who review this summary. i18n work sessions organisation ------------------------------- I attempted to setup daily sessions in order to gather together all i18n people around and discuss the various topics we work on. It half-failed because, for some of those we hapened to conflict with other events and therefore couldn't get everybody to come together. On the other hand, some of these sessions were quite active and productive, as were informal work|hack sessions and I'll try to summarize them here. It finally turns out that daily *meetings* is probably too much and that could be reduced to 3 or 4 meetings (2 of them being formal and included in the schedule) with hack sessions in the meantime. i18n release goals ------------------ I already summarized this one, so let's just mention what has been decided to propose as lenny release goals: - Support for packages' description translation in the archive Advocate: Michael Bramer - Switch remaining debconf translations to use gettext Advocate: Nicolas François - Prepare the system for translatable NEWS.Debian files Advocate: Steve Langasek - Support for UTF-8 encoded manpages Advocate: Nicolas François - Prepare the system to be able to have a default font for each language Advocate: Nicolas Spalinger Translation licensing -------------------- It is proposed to try standardizing PO files headers. faw (Felipe Augusto van de Wiel) will make a proposal for a standard header that would be produced by our i18n tools such as po-debconf tools. All translations are considered derived work, so it will be suggested to translators to just license them with the same license than the package they pertain to, when they're connected to a package (po-debconf, Debian native programs). The mention should then be "This file is distributed under the same license as the <foo> package". In parallel, a work is currently conducted by faw and Don Armstrong to identify and contact all translators for the web site and have them relicense their work under the GPLv2 or EXPAT MIT licenses. All translations should also include a copyright. Given the current state of PO files, it is suggested to consider that the copyright, if nothing else is mentioned, is held by the person listed in the "Last-Translator" field. We will try to enforce the use of a license notice and a copyright on every file. For this a lintian check should be added, checking for the presence of some standard texts in the PO file headers. If such lintian check is accepted, a huge amount of warnings will be spilled out to maintainers. These will want to have translators fix their files (the warning will suggest this). In order to have the relicensing work to happen, it is proposed to add a "--relicense" option to podebconf-report-po to make such a "call for relicense" easy to do. A test for this could also be added on churro. The sequence would then become: 1) propose a standard header 2) lintian patch 3) could be a project by i18n 4) add --relicense option to podebconf-report-po 5) then, one by one work on existing packages The DDTP should add a copy right to translations and the DDTSS should also be adapted probably. Work on Pootle and churro server -------------------------------- Felipe worked on some admin cleaning on churro (aka i18n.debian.net). Nicolas François and Felipe updated Pootle on churro to version 1.00 (soon 1.01). Some performance improvements have been noticed and it allowed us getting rid of a modified Pootle version as upstream has included most of the patches proposed by Nicolas. The scripts we use on churro (robots, etc.) should all go to the debian-l10n project on Alioth as soon as it switches to SVN (switch to SVN to be done by Nicolas François, in sync with Thomas Huriaux). DDTP integration with Pootle ---------------------------- Michael Bramer (grisu) has been granted an account on spaetzle|churro (including sudo access to be able to setup any stuff he could need). He worked to bring the DDTP running on churro instead of one of his servers. The DDTP scripts will also be integrated to the debian-l10n project on Alioth. The complete set of Czech DDTP files has been integrated into churro for performance testing purposes. The integration went well (much better than the attempts during the Extremadura meeting). We still have performance issues because of the huge number of files (over 20.000 PO files per language). It has been identified as Pootle opening all stats file when entering a project. Nicolas will try to add an option for Pootle to skip the stats update step when entering directories with a big number of files. Some work is also needed to implement a locking system so that external tools interacting with Pootle files can do it safely even when users are working on the PO files. The integration identified a few packages with broken PO files (because of incorrect ISO encoding in the control file, which is non policy-compliant). Felipe will take care of sending RC bug reports (with patches) for these. QA work for l10n ---------------- This discussion came out from a BOF originally proposed by the Japanese l10n team. During this BOF, the few of us attending (mostly Christian and Felipe) presented the current methods used by the larger l10n teams in Debian to work on translation QA. The robots that crawl mailing lists and the BTS have been presented and explained as well as the translation QA process shared by a few teams. "tdebs" ------- The idea of tdebs, or more generally packages containing only translations and offered separately from binary packages, is floating around for a while. This idea has been again discussed in the "Whacky ideas" BOF and discussions seem to show that this is something that could be feasible. tdebs would be a kind of regular package with a different suffix. They would probably group more than one translation in one tdeb to avoid the problem of exponential growing of the number of packages. This will make sense for packages where the translations themselves are too small to have one tdeb per language. In order to support discreete selection of translations when using bundled translations, a filtering mechanism will be needed. Ideas float to make them versioned in a way allowing for updates independent from the relevant binary package (in a way that could be similar to binNMU numbering scheme) That would need changes to dpkg, apt and such tools. Eddy Petrisor is in charge of this topic and will update the relevant page on Debian wiki. Some formal prototyping would help focusing ideas and trigger discussions. Some dpkg maintainers also favour this idea which could help it being adopted. We could use churro as a test mirror if that is needed at some moment. Talk with Ubuntu ---------------- Some talks happened with people involved in the Ubuntu "Debian collaboration" project (mostly Martin Albisetti). They aim at working on tools to better interface the Ubuntu i18n infrastructure (Rosetta) and the Debian one (or the future Debian one). Debian concerns about the way to handle i18n in Ubuntu have been mentioned. Apparently, the approach in Rosetta is now slowly evolving from a "we'll translate everything whatever way we do it" approach to something closer to the "Debian way" to do i18n work (QA work, avoid work duplication, etc.) and it was concluded that a dedicated live meeting between key representatives in both projets could be something to make happen in order to improve the overall infrastructure. The idea of building a place where translation work done in Ubuntu and translation work done in Debian could converge (as branches in a common Revision Control System, for instance) has been raised. This certainly needs to be improved, discussed, criticized, etc. If that's possible, arranging such a meeting could be done and this will be proposed to Canonical, thanks to the good connections we have throught the common excellent work on Debian Installer. Extremadura meeting ------------------- The idea of a future work session in Extremadura, specifically targeted on DDTP/DDTSS and their integration on churro and Pootle has been proposed. Cesar Gomez Martin, who was attending DebConf confirmed this is very probably possible, as long as it hapens in 2007. We decided to have such work session in Novembre or December, depending on the schedule that can be proposed by César. The meeting *will* be focused on DDTP and churro work and should not exceed 10 people, all being involved in the work about these projects (including the DDTSS server). The target is offering some infrastructure to get as many packages descriptions as possible to be translated for lenny (we don't really need Pootle for this to happen but that would help anyway). --
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