gweather ships a very comprehensive locations database. GNOME-Applets 2.9.2 has some 3000+ more locations to this database[1] from syncing with the latest METAR list, but now we need your help. The database now has support for <city> tags (as well as <region>, <country> and <state>). While region, country, and state are all easy to work out, city tags are hard, it's easy to figure out what locations are in a city (sometimes) but not what their local names are. As a result, many names are things like "Location 1" or "My Location (alternate)". This is where you come in, spread around the world, and having a good knowledge of local, state and maybe even national geography, you will be able to clean up the locations file for your area. How do you do this? 1) Check out the latest version of Locations.xml.in [2] 2) Fix up your area, the format for the XML file should be fairly evident, or you can consult the DTD [3]. 3) Use xmllint and the DTD to check that the file structure is still sane. 4) File a bug in bugzilla under the gweather component of gnome-applets. Give it the subject, "Locations Love - $my_area". Attach a context diff of the Locations.xml.in file. If you're a new contributor to GNOME, this is a really good way to get yourself in the Changelog and NEWS file. This type of bread and butter work is really easy, and you don't even have to build any software to do it ;) Remember that all strings in the Locations.xml.in file should be in the C locale (US english). This means that locations should use their American names or anglicized names. Otherwise use the local name. If you use an anglicized name, add a comment to the XML so that translators know about the local name. I would really like this done as soon as possible so that translators can get to work on getting the translations for the database up to scratch. I want to have a really rocking locations database ready for GNOME 2.10 (and eventually weather.gnome.org). Also, maintaining the locations database has been proving to be an increasingly time consuming task for me. If you feel you might be up to scratch at maintaining this database, drop me a line, I could do with some help. Happy Hacking, --davyd [1] a log showing new locations/changed locations and removals is here: http://oracle.bridgewayconsulting.com.au/~davyd/misc/locations_changes.log [2] http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/*checkout*/gnome-applets/gweather/Locations.xml.in [3] http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/*checkout*/gnome-applets/gweather/locations.dtd -- Davyd Madeley http://www.davyd.id.au/ PGP Fingerprint <http://www.davyd.id.au/pgp/> 08B0 341A 0B9B 08BB 2118 C060 2EDD BB4F 5191 6CDA
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