Chinese Release Notes errors

[Ruediger Landmann]

On 11/18/2009 11:53 PM, John J. McDonough wrote:
> Right now I can't say for sure.  The batch job I run every night 
> started around 0700Z and at that time, there were still plenty of 
> errors.  However, I see rudi posted a zh-CN to docs.fp.o around an 
> hour later.  Whether he manually corrected the files before building 
> that or they were good when he downloaded them I can't say, and it is 
> now his nighttime, so I'll have to check with him in his morning.

Yeah; I manually corrected these when I built the docs.

>
> The zh-CN version at http://fedora.is-sixsigma.com/F12beta/ I 
> corrected to see whether there were other types of errors. Because I 
> don't totally understand the interaction with Transifex, I'm not 
> comfortable pushing my edits back to git.

For trivial stuff like this (a missing ';' at the end of an entity, or a 
broken XML tag), I'll always push the fix back. The worst that can 
happen is that if a translator is already working with an earlier 
version of the file, she or he will overwrite your changes when she or 
he next checks in the file. In other words, the doc maintainer's work is 
lost, not the translator's work.

>
> I did notice in the version at docs.fp.o that there were some entire 
> sections in English in spite of Transifex saying 100%.  I notice that 
> some other languages have those same sections untranslated.  My first 
> reaction was to blame that on Publican producing a bad pot, but then I 
> found some other languages where those same sections are translated, 
> which leads me to suspect that perhaps those po's were checked out 
> when the new branch was made.  I need to scratch my head a little to 
> sort out how we can deal with that.

This is something that we've known about for quite some time -- it has 
affected many (most?) of our docs in both F11 and F12. The process that 
we follow to merge and split the PO files is imperfect. Some strings 
that are translated in the PO file that we receive from Transifex do not 
always get split back correctly into Publican's multiple PO files.

In past discussions on F-T-L the consensus seems to have been to live 
with this until we get Transifex 0.7, which allows translators to work 
directly with the PO files generated by Publican. Not only will this 
eliminate the messy merging and splitting, but it will make it simple 
for translators to check their work to ensure that it builds, and also 
allow them to proofread their translations easily.

In the case of the Release Notes, we have the added complication of 
maintaining a slightly modified branch of the document so that thousands 
and thousands of strings from the tables don't find their way into the 
merged PO files for Transifex. As the makeup of the tables themselves 
has changed slightly between the Beta, GA, and 0-day versions of the 
Release Notes, not all of these changes have made their way into the 
merged PO files. Next time, we'll need to come up with a more robust 
process to ensure that this doesn't happen again.

Very soon (once the RN package is finalized) we will need to regenerate 
the PO files to accommodate changes in how Publican 1.x handles PO 
files, in preparation for Fedora 13. At that time, translators will also 
be able to make final fine-tuning of the Fedora 12 notes and hopefully 
eliminate a few more of these English strings.

If any translation teams would like the files regenerated more 
immediately, please speak up, but remember that if we do it for *any* 
language, it will affect *all* languages.

Cheers

Ruediger