[Mageia-i18n] www pages: about and main index

[Romain d'Alverny]

On Fri, May 25, 2012 at 6:41 PM, Yuri Chornoivan <yurchor at ukr.net> wrote:
> Just of curiosity, a couple of questions.
>
> 1. What was the reason to choose unsustainable format that is not recognized
> by the existing toolchains (lang)?

My past experience with gettext (4 years, I dropped it about 3 years
ago, things may have changed since) has been terrible (mostly, because
gettext is [was?] not thread-safe and the server implementation made
that hugely problematic). So we had erratic server behaviour regarding
locale management on our websites.

I could have migrated to .po files nonetheless and use a library
reimplementing gettext over it. But frankly, the past struggles with
gettext (in a Web context - it does perfectly its job in a local app
context) made me want to try something else, lighter (so less featured
as well obviously). I know Mozilla used to have .lang files too, I
checked it out a bit and thought it would be worth the try; and
perhaps would we be able to reuse their own libs in this regard.

> 2. Consider someone decided to change something on a webpage. How can we
> (translators) know about the changes (Manually parse svn diffs, copy and
> paste diffs from PHP page? What about fuzzy matches?) ?

First, someone would be identified - I commit about 95% of what goes
on www, 5 other percent are between obgr and dams. That's for the
code, content, layout, etc. (I'm not happy with this either). I wrote
quickly report and diff utilities so you can have a look (and we can
rework them, just tell me how), but I expect to sneak peak at
Mozilla's codebase.

So, upon modified or added contents on a webpage, that would happen in
English only (that's the pivot language). That will need to extract
the string from the source, inject it in the lang file, and the diff
will appear on the report page then. No need for anyone to play with
PHP code, you will only edit the .lang files.

And there won't be fuzzy matches. The string will be blankly added, or removed.

> P.S. Written when struggling to realize where to place the new strings from
> http://www.mageia.org/langs/report.php
> Thinking about left this without translation in the future.

? didn't understand. What was the issue?

Note that I'm all to improve and ease the translation process for you
- but being alone, I do it with what my experience has been as well -
that will explain as well why I chose a dead boring simple homemade
framework for the Web site, and not an existing CMS - the situation
wouldn't be the same with an active 3 or 4-seats Web team.

And again, tell me if I'm missing something or if something can be
improved for you.