-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hello guys,
I found a wrong translation in the last po file I have submitted to you and I wanted to correct it. Ok, nothing simpler, svn up, kbabel ro.po, fix strings, send email. Well, that's how it should have been... But is not. So what am I trying to do, is to educate you guys :-) to do the right thing every time translations are updated. Not only that the translations are broken, but the game can be, too. Yes, it can, I am not a raging lunatic [*]. (Note that the paragraph below might be mistakenly interpreted as rant; rest assured, it is not.) The problem was that I made that po after doing the right thing(tm) in the po directory. This was simply msgmerged in the po directory, resulting in 26 fuzzy strings which are only the result of the fact that the wormux.pot in SVN is outdated. The bad thing is that I have to work thrice for this: one, the initial translation with updates, now, second, to unfuzzy some strings which are fuzzy because the translation was ahead of the trunk pot file - which, I expected to be updated before my translation was merged, an third, when the pot file will be actually updated and will render, yet another time many of the messages into fuzzy ones since the older (now current) msgid-s are different from the new (generated from the SVN trunk code) msgid, ironically identical to the ones in the initial translation I sent. In order to prevent such inconveniences and vain work, here are some simple rules to follow (easy scriptable, most of them :-). - - Please allow translators to update their strings before releases. Make string freezes and make calls for updates, which can be easily scripted [**]. All of these should be done before releases. - - Remove the po/wormux.pot file from time to time - better[*], or before releases, just before the call for translation updates, and run make (after running ./configure) in the po/ directory. This would allow translation to have their strings updated according to the most recent code in SVN and should avoid breakage as described in [*]. - - Before integrating a translation, but after putting the file in po/, do the same as before - run make in the po/ directory so that the resulted po file is never updated with a broken/old version. Bonus: If the translator had a freeze period before his translation (and we are still in the freeze period, of course), the template will not change and the translator has the occasion to reach 100% translation percentage in the released version to follow. I have wrote this mail, since I have seen that i18n work flow inside wormux-dev seems to be little chaotic (this is the third time I have seen bad work flow around i18n). HTH [*] if you have string "bla bla happened %d times during %s" and you turn it into "bla bla happened %d times", if the translations are outdated the resulted string will request two parameters and you can imagine the results. This has happened before for Ubuntu translations. [**] Debian has a nice utility called podebconf-report-po which could be easily modified and wrapped over to fit the needs of regular po updates, not only podebconf templates - I have looked fast over it to evaluate what it would take to change it to fit the needs of a project like yours. - -- Regards, EddyP ============================================= "Imagination is more important than knowledge" A.Einstein -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFFcGgTY8Chqv3NRNoRAvl0AKDVev5ZpZSOBzJSXZWBuPjmnv9XpgCfeC0B /Y1+ys6Yx5VwMtaYgKga7CM= =7sed -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Wormux-dev mailing list Wormux-dev@gna.org https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/wormux-dev
