Re: External projects using gnome for translation?

[Todd Berman <tberman sevenl net>]

On Mon, 2004-04-05 at 16:51 +0200, Christian Rose wrote:
> sön 2004-04-04 klockan 18.25 skrev Todd Berman:
> > 	I am the maintainer of MonoDevelop http://www.monodevelop.com which is
> > a IDE (not just for mono, the name is a bit misleading). I have spent
> > the last little bit converting our i18n to use gettext. I am wondering
> > if it is possible to commit a pot file somewhere on gnome's cvs (which I
> > have write access to already), and get translations done that way.
> > 
> > 	Although MonoDevelop is not hosted on the gnome cvs server, it is
> > absolutely and 100% designed to be a gnome application (We have some
> > ungnomey parts, but we are working on it).
> > 
> > 	Please CC me on any replies, as I am not on this list, and thank you
> > very much for any replies, and all the wonderful work you people have
> > done for translating gnome. :)
> 
> We used to host pot and po files for external projects in the GNOME cvs
> server for this purpose in the past, but we don't do that anymore.
> 
> The reason is that it was rather a rule rather than an exception that
> the synchronization with upstream got messy and unattended after a
> while, and in both directions. Maintainers upstream forgot to send new
> pot files, and translators forgot to send their translations in GNOME
> cvs also upstream in addition to committing them to cvs.
> The result of all this mess was a lot of wasted and obsolete work from
> translators, and suboptimal translations upstream, so we decided to stop
> with this and only do translations for software actually hosted in GNOME
> cvs.
> 

Well, I was assuming I would just pull new translations down and sync
them myself, no need for translators to do that extra step. Put, that is
unimportant, as you guys no longer do it ;)

> Also, there is a "cousin" translation project to the GNOME Translation
> Project (GTP) that is simply called the Translation Project (TP). The TP
> has a much better procedure for handling external projects (in fact it
> *only* does "external" projects), so it seemed silly to compete with the
> TP in this respect. And in the end, many translators in the GTP also
> translate in the TP, so there should be no concern over translation
> quality.
> 
> 
> So what I think you should do is to first and foremost decide on where
> you want to be hosted. If that is the GNOME cvs, then you can use the
> GNOME Translation Project as soon as you've moved. Being in GNOME cvs
> also has other advantages if you'd like to consider your application
> GNOME software, as you can then more easily benefit from the
> contributions of other GNOME developers.
> 

Well, the project is currently hosted on a subversion server on the
mono-cvs box. We have considered moving it to the cvs server on the same
computers, however I am unwilling to gain next to nothing, and loose a
lot of history. I would be willing to move to the gnome cvs server,
because, as you say, there are a lot of benefits. The one downside is
that I have a number of developers who don't yet have write access to
gnome's cvs. So I dont know how feasible importing a 100,000 line csharp
application and asking for 5 or 6 new cvs accounts would be to some of
the gnome guys ;).

> If you'd rather still be hosted where you currently are, then the TP is
> most certainly most suitable for you. You can read more about how to
> register with the TP at the TP homepage on the TP homepage
> http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/contrib/po/HTML/ and on
> http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/translation/HTML/maintainers.html
> specifically.
> 

Thanks a lot for the info. I am unsure of what I am going to do right
now, but will be figuring it out soon.

--Todd

> I can also recommend reading
> http://developer.gnome.org/doc/tutorials/gnome-i18n/developer.html#tp
> which basically outlines what I've already said about the GTP and TP,
> but that document also contains other useful stuff to know as a
> maintainer about translation and strings.
> 
> 
> Christian