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

Romain d'Alverny rdalverny at gmail.com
Fri May 25 23:50:37 CEST 2012


On Fri, May 25, 2012 at 11:02 PM, Yuri Chornoivan <yurchor at ukr.net> wrote:
> I am not telling about server side at all. Why not extract all the strings
> form these .lang files into reliable format. It should be deadly easy with
> the current format (drop two lines and extract every line with ";" at the
> beginning. It can be done even via PHP. Then generate .lang for locales
> using cron with minimal task priority.
>
> No mistakes in quotation, no formatting breaks, no extra manual job, no
> additional load on server for every single translation update, no additional
> pages with lists, no wiki explanations, just tell the translators the name
> of the directory in SVN and the single pot file (generated by cron).

Better go with gettext all the way down and reimplement gettext in PHP
then. Right.

But keep in mind too that all candidates to translating the web site
may have no experience at all, or no experience with .po files either
or even SVN. So, having explanations, documentation and some web
reports is not necessarily luxury.

> But with all respect, Mozilla (currently) has some language teams with
> number of members that exceeds the number of all Mageia translators. They
> can waste their resources, at least in the current state.

Look. I did this in about 2 days to ease your process, from a stage
where things were obviously not good. I took the short, quick road to
make something quick, affordable and that you can build upon and we
can have a better translated website. And to have something easier to
migrate, later, to something like, or actually gettext.

> That's what I see now:
>
> украї́нська мо́ва (wrong, by the way. It should be "Українська". I wrote
> Oliver about this, but nobody cares :'( ):

There may be other reasons than carelessness. Fixed.

For all the other remarks, you're right. That was quickly assembled in
a few minutes. I welcome that you expect more and better than that.

> Very sad. It's not a big problem to translate even whole KDE or GNOME with
> their docs and wikis (believe me, at least about KDE ;) ). It's a problem to
> keep them translated.
>
> The Rosetta situation with whole string discarding for one comma or one
> space is somewhat unacceptable without any chance to have at least
> minimalistic translation memory.

The current (and previsible) state of the Web site is that string are
rarely, if ever, rewritten/fixed: it's written once, and freezed for
ever, or thrown away. Call that a waste if you like. It's a
possibility to start things over as well.

> There are no big issues now. But it will end up bad for the following
> reasons:
>
> 1. Copy-pasting from report page can break (and will break) the sequence of
> messages making a total mess of outdated/new/existing translations.

The sequence of message is of no importance. A file is just a dictionary.

> 2. No translation memory, hence no uniform translations and no saving of
> time if something has been already translated earlier.

Granted. But won't have a single .po file per locale for the whole
website anyway, but several of those. Even if compressed, there's no
reason to load a huge dictionary in memory for a single page that
would use only 10/20 strings at most (yes, gettext is expected to
cache those in memory; but gettext has issues in multithreaded
environment - that may have been fixed and I may have unjustified
fears, but I have no support developer for helping me here with this
either).

> 3. Fragmentation with minimal scaling. What is the future? Directory with
> dozens of files from different releases (2.uk.lang, 2-1.uk.lang, 3.uk.lang,
> 3beta.uk.lang, etc.)? Dozen of directories for different releases? Table
> with 70 language columns and dozens of rows?

Mageia 2 is one release. You get a single file for this release:
2.ll.lang (plus a full update of the index.ll.lang). It happens that
I'm moving things around now, so there are many other files pending.

> 1. If as a result of lacking manpower nothing can be done with the
> above-mentioned issues, can we have RSS/Atom feed (automatic) for the report
> page to automate the process of updating or automatic messaging to this list
> (with no manual sending warnings needed) in the case when English strings
> are changed/added?

That's on my roadmap, but I'm still not sure how to put this to work.
Will come when I have time.

> 2. If it is not hard to do, can the .lang files be regenerated automatically
> (with keeping the order of current English pivot)? Identifying of
> untranslated strings can be harder, but at least it will keep the logical
> order of the messages.

This can be done too; it won't change the identification of
untranslated strings (that's unrelated, unless you consider the web
report draft script as useless - again good to explain what a better
report would look like).


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