L10N Infrastructure Roadmap (was Re: FLP Meeting 2009-01-28 IRC Log)

[Dimitris Glezos]

On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 3:31 AM, Asgeir Frimannsson <asgeirf at redhat.com> wrote:
> Since the first recorded Transifex-commit in Nov 2007 until Dec 2008, 176
> out of ~450 unique FAS users (in the cvsl10n group) committed translations
> through the system, a few commits away from a total of 5000 commits to 86
> modules.

Cool stats! Also worth noting that release notes were translated in more than
20 languages with 80%+.

> Documentation-statistics for Publican didn't work for F10, as Damned Lies
> has issues with having a PO file for each XML file withing a project.

Is this an issue for the newer Django branch of Damned Lies? I
estimate that adding Publican support to Transifex is a matter of a
few hours of development time. If the Publican group could help Fedora
L10n with this task, it'd be great. Please send patches directly my
way and I'll test/merge right away.

> The new Django-based Damned Lies and Transifex looks promising, and will
> hopefully solve many of the issues we experienced through the F9+F10 cycle.

It's worth noting here that Transifex v0.5 includes statistics support and
will be released in March.

> As Ankit mentioned, an initial list of Issues and Requirements for Fedora
> L10N is listed on the following wiki-page:
>
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/L10N/issues_and_requirements

Thanks for this list. I've answered most of the issues on my reply to
the talk page, which I won't paste again here.

  https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Talk:L10N/issues_and_requirements#Comments_by_Dimitris_Glezos

Let's make sure we encourage translators to bring such issues at the
proper channels, which are this list and our bug reporting services.

> I thought it might be useful to have a forum for open discussion about what
> works and does not work with the current infrastructure, and how we can make
> it better for future iterations of Fedora. Above I've presented a few ideas
> and requirements. However, it would be very interesting to read comments,
> ideas and suggestions from you Fedora-translators, about what is working
> well, and ideas on how to improve what is not working well.

My understanding is that our translators first and mostly need services that
have a high uptime and do work as intended. Our lack of administration
resources is being reflected by our services' bad performance over the past
months. With this in high priority, we can work on improvements.

Such improvements are the main focus for a few months on both my work and
Diego on Transifex. The feedback we've received from large projects like
GNOME, Debian, LXDE, etc. has been positive and we'll be able to release
the completely-rewritten Transifex v0.5 in the next month.

> Based on this input, perhaps we can have an open discussion on where we want
> to go, and look at the resources we can each contribute to making Fedora
> better, as well as looking at how Damned Lies, Transifex, as well as e.g.
> Translate Toolkit & Pootle and upcoming tools like flies fit in.

As part of our work with Indifex [1], both me and Diego are working hard in
improving Transifex and making it more featureful than ever. At some point in
the next month we'll completely support all of DL's features and so many more,
like statistics, user registrations, user-added modules, tags, collections,
releases, openid, notifications for file changes, RSS, comments, and a few
other secret ones.

Our goal is to work with every interested party in creating The Open
Translation Platform, which any project can use to cover their translation
needs. If there's any specific feature you'd like to see included, please feel
free to just drop by #transifex on Freenode or simply send us your
feature requests [2].

Happy translating and hacking. =)

-δ


[1] Indifex: http://www.indifex.com/
[2] Tx feature requests: http://transifex.org/wiki/FeatureRequests


-- 
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)
--