Easily grabbing all POs for one language

[Dimitris Glezos]

One feature that is really useful for a translator is to be able to
download all the PO files for their language easily.

We've been receiving this request for *years* now, and rightly so!
Here's why: On elvis, I estimate all language's POs totalled about
500MB. To download them, one needed 2 hours on an ADSL, or 20 hours on
PSTN. A langpack of PO files for a single language weighted at about
10MB. That's 3 minutes on ADSL or just 25 minutes on PSTN. Now think
of giving the chance to the translator to download the langpack
zipped. It could go down to 2MB -- that's 30 seconds on ADSL, 4
minutes on PSTN.

Unless I'm mistaken in some calculations, does the above mean we could
allow our translators on PSTN lines to get the files they need to
contribute by waiting 4 minutes instead of 20 hours?

Here's a handy single command that gets you all F9 language files
(msgmerged) for a particular language from
translate.fedoraproject.org. I've already added it to our FAQ page.

  export MYLANG=el
  wget -nv -r -N -l 1 --accept *$MYLANG.po -nd -nH -P pofiles
http://translate.fedoraproject.org/languages/$MYLANG/fedora-9

My dream is to have the tools to do all the dirty work for us, and
save us time for enjoying life instead. So, I'd like to add support to
Transifex to serve PO files, ready to be translated, from the command
line. Something like this:

  tx list-modules (see what modules we serve)
  tx get <anaconda> (get all anaconda files)
  tx get <anaconda> --lang=<el> (get iclandic anaconda PO)
  tx get --lang=<is> --gz  (get all iclandic files, zipped)
  tx get --tag=<fedora-websites> (get only files related to Fedora websites)
  ...translate...
  tx login
  tx submit anaconda po/is.po

Until we have such a dream tool to our disposal, we'll have to settle
with the wget-style command.

So after a lot of jabber, here's the rub. We could have the above wget
command run daily on our servers, and produce a langpack for each
language in .tar.gz with all its PO files, for easily download. Is
this something we want to spend some time on, or are we OK with
running the wget command for now?

-d


-- 
Dimitris Glezos
Jabber ID: glezos at jabber.org, GPG: 0xA5A04C3B
http://dimitris.glezos.com/

"He who gives up functionality for ease of use
loses both and deserves neither." (Anonymous)
--