ubuntu-translations-coordinators team mailing list archive

[David Planella <david.planella@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

I've noticed the following templates in the Karmic import queue:

debian/po-up/patches.pot (gnome-session)
po/patched.pot (gnome-session)
debian/po-up/patches.pot (gnome-panel)
debian/po-up/patches.pot (gnome-session)
po/patched.pot (gnome-session)

Apparently they are templates inherited from Debian which contain the
string changes introduced by patches.

seb128 told me on IRC that this is a marginal practice, and my
understanding was that in general packagers tend to prefer the single
template approach because it seems to generate less cruft in the source
package.

From this, I assume that the best thing to do for now is _not_ to
approve them and ask packagers to provide a single template as usual.

Arne, I had never seen these before in the imports queue, but then again
I'm new to this. Have you dealt with these cases before? What do you
recommend?

On a related thought, I am wondering if producing a separate template
from patches (assuming it would become a general practice) could help in
a request translators (and generally those who translate upstream) often
have: clearly mark Ubuntu-specific strings in the UI.

The implementation would have two sides:

= Packaging =

Ubuntu developers would have to generalise the practice of generating a
separate template (e.g. patches.pot) for those original string changes
introduced by patches.

My understanding is that it would not be difficult to implement in
technical terms (adding the patch-translations.mk rule in debian/rules),
but that it would add an additional overhead when uploading the
packages, since all the po files for those templates (contained in the
debian/po-up directory) would also have to be uploaded.

In general, I understand that packagers would not especially welcome
this change.

(I'm CC'ing Martin and Seb here to see if they've got more to add)

= Launchpad =

There would be two templates for each source package to import (assuming
the case of one pot per package for the sake of simplicity).

In the ideal case those two templates could then be merged into one and
presented to translators in the same way as it is now. Before the merge
though, the strings from the patches.pot template could be identified
and perhaps allow for an additional 'Ubuntu-only strings' filter in the
UI. I think this is something those teams only translating upstream
would welcome.

I understand that this might add complexity and most probably a special
case for Ubuntu on the Launchpad side. This is just an idea, not a spec,
and I'm just trying to get some feedback on this.

Regards,
David.

-- 
David Planella
Ubuntu Translations Coordinator
david(dot)planella(at)ubuntu(dot)com
www.ubuntu.com

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