Re: Introducing NewStuffManager

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Fri, 2006-10-06 at 21:10 +0200, Sebastian P�erl wrote:
> Shaun McCance wrote:
> >
> > I have some comments and questions after reading that
> > page.  Mind you, I haven't downloaded NewStuffManager
> > or dug into it.  I'm going off of what you've described
> > on the web page.
> >
> > The repository XML files contain human-readable strings,
> > like the name element.  From the RNG scheme, it doesn't
> > appear these can be localized using the standard xml:lang
> > attribute.
> >
> I must admit didn't think of i18n or l10n at all.
> 
> But I don't think it's a good idea to internationalize the repository's
> XML file.
> Especially the name element. Can you really translate the name of a plugin?
> Furthermore, it would be lot of work to translate all the stuff for a big
> repository and contents can change often. So you would need to translate
> the file over and over again.
> Lastly. RPM or deb files aren't internationalized either.

I didn't know RPM and deb weren't internationalized.  If that's
the case, I think that's a very poor decision on the parts of
those developers.  Both of them contain a lot of information
that should be translated into the user's language.

You absolutely can translate the name of a plugin, just as we
translate the names of applications.  You certainly want stable
IDs, but names are human-readable content.  The first example
we encounter on the web page is "Leo.org dictionary".  The word
"dictionary" is an English word.  Germans, presumably, would
rather see "Leo.org W�rbuch".

When names are simple functional descriptions, there is no doubt
they should be translated.  When they are catchy words (Epiphany,
Evolution, Ekiga), then perhaps not.  But even in those cases,
some languages would like to be able to transliterate those
words to their alphabet.

As for the effort required to keep all those translations inside
the repository, it's a lot of effort to do all the translations
as it is, but we manage.  Why?  Because Gnome has the best damn
translation teams on the planet.  All we have to do is get stuff
hooked up to PO files in Gnome CVS, and translations will happen.
Surely we can write a clever script to add plugins to the server
which will extract translated data from the tarball and merge it
all into the repository XML file.  We're smart like that.

> > The repository XML file doesn't seem to contain any way
> > of specifying versions of the application for which the
> > plugin can be used.  Imagine, for instance, the plugin
> > bar for the application foo.  Version 2 of foo adds some
> > new hooks for plugins, which version 2 of bar uses.  But
> > we keep version 1 of bar in the repository for people
> > still using version 1 of foo.
> >
> That's true that can cause some issues. But you could also provide two
> repository files one for version 1 and one for version 2.

That seems like a feasible way of doing things.

The other points were pretty minor, and your replies were
sensible, so I'll leave them alone.

And just not to come off too negative, what NewStuffManager
is doing is absolutely awesome, and I'm excited to get it
into Gnome.

--
Shaun