[Mageia-i18n] Translators, rise and shine!

[Rémi Verschelde]

... was the motto we used on a previous blog article asking for more
translators[1].

And effectively, many contributors rose and we thank you for that.
Still, since both Oliver and I have been pretty busy at the beginning
of the year, we couldn't take the time to follow what you have been
working on, and we don't really know if you did shine as intended :)
We had two meetings in 2012, and there were not many contributors
attending; I don't blame anyone, since I could not make it to the
meetings either.
Now, I get the feeling that the i18n team is gently sleeping, without
complaining, until some works is explicitly given.

And you know what? I've got some for you ;)
You may know that the release of Mageia 2 is planned for the 3rd of
May, 2012[2]. Good enough, it seems we've got some time left.
Actually, we can't think this way; our translations have to be
uploaded on the Subversion repository (SVN) way before that release,
and the final deadline for string translation is on the 10th of March.
That leaves us only 3 weeks to finalize our work, so it's high time we
rise again and start to shine!

So, how should we proceed to work efficiently, and to have all our
translations included in Mageia 2 when it's released?

– Step 1: Wake up and check if your teammates are still alive. At the
scale of all i18n teams, we don't really manage to keep track of who's
active, who can contribute and who can't, so we really need you to
coordinate the team you are part of and to write us reports. So,
please, if you are the leader of your team, try to contact all
acknowledged members[3], using your mailing list or whichever means of
communication you use. Of course, if you know that all your team
members are active, you don't need to bother asking them to say so
once again. If you are not the leader of your team, make sure your
leader is active and knows that you are. Eventually, if your team's
leader seems unresponsive, please contact us (Oliver and I) personally
so that we can find a solution.

– Step 2: Check that you have active members in your team with commit
rights on Mageia's SVN repository. As a reminder for those who forgot
or didn't read the wiki carefully, the translations which are on
Transifex need to be uploaded to the SVN repository to be included in
the final release. Transifex is just a tool for us translators, but
the developers do not take our translations directly from it. So, each
team should have one or two people who have been granted commit
rights. Please make sure that you have a least one active committer in
your team and that she knows how to commit .po files to Mageia's SVN
repository. I have added the mention “commit rights” aside the name of
each contributor who has these rights, in the i18n teams wiki page
linked before. Please note that if you have not put your name and
username on the said wiki page[3], we are forced to consider that you
are not active, and we may end up removing you the access to Tx (and
the commit rights to the SVN if you had them). So please check that
your name and username are on this page.

– Step 3: Have one person in your team send a report to Oliver and I
about who is active in your team, who is the leader, the deputy leader
and who has commit rights. If nobody in your team has commit rights,
or if you think it would be of use to your team that you get those
rights, please tell us too. Many teams lack committers but we don't
want to put one random person per team in the committers group without
knowing if she is active and knows SVN.

– Step 4: Continue to translate all the strings which need
translation. Just note that there currently is an annoying bug with
Tx[4] which prevents us from uploading .po files to Tx. This means
that :
   * You _can_ work on the translations online, using Tx web
interface, and download the .po files in the end to commit them to the
SVN.
   * You _cannot_ download the .po file, work on it offline and then
upload it back to Tx. The sysadmins are trying to fix this bug, and we
know some of you really like to use their own offline translation
software; sorry about that issue.
   * Still, if you want to, you _can_ download the .po file and work
offline, and then commit the modified .po file to the SVN. You should
just make it clear with the other members of your time so that they
don't commit the old version from Tx over your newer version, and you
should remember to upload it to Tx once the bug is fixed.

– Step 5: The final deadline is on March 10th. I would like that all
translations for Mageia 2 are committed to the SVN _before_ March 3rd,
i.e. in two weeks. So don't hesitate to start committing your
translations today. Of course, since the deadline is on March 10th,
you will have a few days after the 3rd of March to add new
translations. But it would be great that most of your final work is on
SVN by the 3rd of March. Please note that the translations committed
to the SVN after the 10th of March will likely not be included in
Mageia 2. As usual, you can find statistics about the completion of
the translations for Mageia 2 on Tx[5].

I hope you all understood what I want you to do. Feel free to answer
to this mail if something is not clear enough. There's no reason to
fear an exponential increase in the traffic on this ML, so don't
hesitate to express yourself.

Regards,
Rémi / Akien

[1] http://blog.mageia.org/en/2011/10/13/translators-rise-and-shine/
[2] https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Mageia_2_development#Development_Planning
[3] https://wiki.mageia.org/en/I18n_teams
[4] https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4499
[5] https://transifex.mageia.org/projects/p/mageia_i18n/r/mga2/