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Why do people want translations committed to the VCS?Why do people want translations committed to the VCS?Posted Mar 5, 2010 6:05 UTC (Fri) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861)Parent article: Transifex v0.8 "Magneto" has been released
On my packages I use the Translation Project (http://translationproject.org) and I never commit any .po files to my source code repository at all. Instead, when I want to build my package I simply run a makefile rule that wget's the latest .po files directly from the translationproject.org website, so they're present to be bundled into the source tarball with standard "make dist" etc.
This solves all my problems: translators only get pot files and promote po files to the website; they never have to deal with whatever VCS I happen to be using (or any VCS). I always get the latest translations, any time I want them, without having to do any merging or think at all about pulls or commits or permissions or whatever. About the only advantage I can think of to checking the .po files into the VCS is if it helps you manage multiple parallel lines of development.
One of the annoying things for me, as I look through the VCS history on projects I follow, is how many of them are just commits of translations. Near a release in Gnome, for example, 80+% of commit messages are things like "New French translation" etc.
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Why do you keep source code in the VCS? Posted Mar 5, 2010 11:14 UTC (Fri) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]
[that's a rhetorical question]
"One of the annoying things for me ... just commits of translations" sounds like a plea for better tools, but I have a terrible feeling you're now going to proudly announce that you use CVS or something and thus aren't amenable to using a better tool.
Why do people want translations committed to the VCS? Posted Mar 5, 2010 14:36 UTC (Fri) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link]
Here's a novel idea: if you're going to go to the trouble of commenting why not try to adding some actual content to the discussion? If you want post information-free snarks there are plenty of sites other than LWN that would like to read them. What advantages do you see in keeping translations in the project VCS? Please try actually thinking about it instead of spouting CompSci 101 cliches.
It's obvious why developers like to use VCS's for source code. It's not at all obvious to me why developers would want to bother putting translations in the VCS. I've maintained translated FOSS projects for a long time, some as long as 14 years, and never one time in all those years have I ever even considered wanting to go back to an earlier version of a translation file, or diff two versions. What's the point? I don't know those languages so the differences are meaningless to me. I'm not going to apply patches to the translation files myself: that's why there are translation teams and any change I make directly just subverts their work. If users send me translation patches I direct them to the translation teams so that work can be coordinated there.
I have more than enough on my plate without managing translations as well. To me it seems simpler to let the teams choose their own methods for managing the translation and I just take the results, rather than trying to create an interface to every VCS some developer might want to use so they can keep their work in my tree.
I did suggest one reason to prefer translations in the VCS: if you manage multiple release branches (not development branches) and you need to allow for updated translations of older release branches. Many FOSS projects (and translation projects) don't bother with that, however.
If you'd read my message and looked into Gnome development you'd know Gnome projects use git. When I want to see what's changed upstream since my last merge I check the log and there are tons of commits for translation changes; often so many that bug fixes, features, etc. are lost in the noise. If you have a "better tools" way to fix that I'm interested.
Why do people want translations committed to the VCS? Posted Mar 22, 2010 12:51 UTC (Mon) by robbe (guest, #16131) [Link]
If a user reports a bug against commit 123 including translated output
"knaz fargl minso edli" it would be nice to be able to translate that back to English. What if the translation has since changed and the most up-to-date .po no longer contains this string?
I find it nice that checking out commit 123 will always contain the
Why do people want translations committed to the VCS? Posted Mar 5, 2010 13:31 UTC (Fri) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]
Yes, and who's translating the commit messages?
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