ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Rodney Dawes <dobey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 2014-04-16 at 07:29 +0200, Martin Pitt wrote:
> For scopes in the Ubuntu archive I think it would be better to just
> reference the translation domain in the .ini file, similar to our
> .desktop files. Then they can be covered by langpacks and we wouldn't
> need to update all click apps for new translations.

No, instead of a simple update to the click, which can be installed from
system settings and only take a few seconds for the user to accomplish,
we'd have to build an entirely new image, and require the user to do a
full system update, which will take several minutes for the user to do,
even on an extremely fast connection, and if doing it OTA, may eat up a
significant portion of their bandwidth quota for the month. Or is there
some plan to ship those language packs as click packages that the user
has to install separately, and then update? (It's not clear to me how
the user is supposed to enable alternate languages on the phone images,
given they can't install .debs.)

> > We think using this option (inline translations in the ini files vs reading
> > the translations from .mo files) is the best solution in terms of
> > performance when reading the list of scopes, but we'd like to hear other
> > comments/views too.
> 
> I think the performance question is largely irrelevant. You are going
> to open both files at runtime anyway, you most likely have other parts
> of your click package than the ini file which have translatable
> strings). Also, the disk space for inline vs. .mo translations for a
> few strings isn't going to reach a significant size.

I don't think that's true. See my other reply for more details, but
inline translations can be orders of magnitude less disk access.

> So I think which approach to use should be decided based on how we
> want the translation lifecycle/rollout to look like only.

I don't think that's right. AFAIK, we don't even have a solid plan for
how alternate system (not click packaged apps or scopes) languages are
made available to the user, and how the user would enable them. They
can't be .debs, because the user can't install them. AFAIK, the only way
to enable some languages on the phone right now, is to do it via adb
shell by remounting / with the rw flag, doing an apt-get update,
installing the appropriate language pack, tweaking something in /etc,
and rebooting.