Re: BoF item 12/14: improvements to gtranslator

[Chris Leonard <cjlhomeaddress gmail com>]

On Mon, Sep 10, 2012 at 4:36 AM, Daniel Mustieles García
<daniel mustieles gmail com> wrote:
> Sorry, but I disagree with you.

Absolutely no need to apologize.   I asked the question 'Why" and
you've given me an answer, thank you.  I respect your opinion even if
ti differs from mine, we share far too much in our common interest in
bringing Gnome to as many languages as possible to not be able to have
a perfectly civil conversation (as we are) about the optimal tactics
for achieving common goals.

I sincerely have no wish to start a flame war or a "My favorite tool
is better than yours" back and forth..  I do apologize if my
enthusiasm for Virtaal came across as speaking ill of other tools.
Choice is good.

>
> Gtranslator is a very powerful, easy and intuitive translation application.
> It's interface is simple, because it hasn't floating elements in the window,
> and it has separated boxes for original string, translated string and
> messages table.
>
> Also, having several tools for the same purpose is not a bad thing; if we
> just had one tool for translating, and its maintainer decided to leave the
> project... what would we do? Use Lokalize? ;-)
>
> Gtranslator has a really good plugins system, which allows to expand it
> easily. Instead of killing it, we should fight to create a development group
> to fix and improve it. Also, as I said at GUADEC, I think GT should be part
> of the GNOME desktop applications (since Anjuta is the official IDE, GT
> should be the official translation app). Maybe it would help to find someone
> to maintain it.

I would agree with you that promoting gtranslator from "Extra GNOME
applications" to a more prominent Release Set might be a good tactic
for raising it's profile within the GNOME project.

> GT is done, it's working, and a lot of people uses it. Why don't we try to
> fix it? It isn't completely broken; just 2 or 3 important bugs, but it works
> perfectly... are you sure you want to drop it? I don't agree and I'll keep
> myself trying to improve it, and looking for a maintainer. If we can't
> create or fix our own tools, what are we doing? I'm sure you'll agree with
> me it's stupid, por example, to develope GNOME Shell under .NET Framework
> isn't it? Is the same case with GNOME translations and Lokalize. Many people
> uses Lokalize to translate GNOME... WTF! GNOME is a big project, with a
> great Marketing and a really great i18n teams... aren't we able to find a
> developer and/or a maintainer to fix and improve our translation tool? I
> don't think so.
>
> Instead of deprecating a working application, help us to fix and improve it.
> Please, don't let it die.

I concede that it would be potentially embarrassing and very possibly
send the wrong message about GNOME's commitment to L10n, but in the
end of the day, developers and users will "vote with their fingers and
eyeballs".

I suspect that I obscured my main message with my expression
enthusiasm for Virtaal.  The GNOME project (like any) has limited
developer resources, it is my opinion that improving the submission
process for glibc locales would have a higher impact on overall GNOME
i18n than improving gtranslator, given the plethora of options
available for PO file editing.

cjl