Translations: Upstream-Ubuntu collaboration and how Launchpad can help

[Kenneth Nielsen]

In the words of the the renowned professor Farnsworth "Good news everyone".
This sounds really good and it is needed. Even though I'm not really sure if
you want input at this point, I'm just going to mentions a few special
aspects pertaining to the packages that are specially customized for Ubuntu.


*   Make it harder to customize upstream translations in Ubuntu, and
>      easier to revert from customized translations to the upstream ones.


Especially for teams that have a very tight relationship with upstream, and
knows that they will do their bit, it would be nice to have "lock unless
changed for Ubuntu"-option. This option would make sure that the
translations couldn't be modified in LP, and if you tried you would get a
message saying that if you want to correct a error you should do it
upstream. It should perhaps also affect the place in the big prioritized
list this package has. This option would however rely heavily on the much
more frequent imports from upstream mentioned in the first point, otherwise
it would mean that Ubuntu users would have to wait for bug-fixes.

*   Let Launchpad record contact details for each upstream's translation
>      team, so that people can collaborate more easily.


This is so incredible important. We have so many volunteers coming in that
loses their interest, because we have to tell them that it is not as easy as
just translating the packages in LP, because before they do that they really
should try to figure out where we can send the translation to get them
upstream. We the admins could of course offer to do it for them, but that
would be more work than we are currently able to handle. Another important
thing here about packages that are modified for ubuntu, is that there should
be an extra export option, that would allow us to extract a po-file
containing all the translations that have been done in LP BUT in a po-file
that includes only the messages that were present in the original file.

*   Support any future API for submitting translations elsewhere, and
>      accepting/rejecting suggestions from elsewhere.


I think it would be extremely productive to have a look at this project
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Interviews/DimitrisGlezos and figure out how
to integrate with that. If this project is realized it will be very
practical, exactly because it will do the one thing that Rosetta is so
sorely missing, and that is an easy way to send things upstream. I think it
would be ineffective to make this feature twice. Why don't we just make sure
that LP can talk to transifex and let it do the rest?

I'll look forward to the development of Rosetta in a way that will make it
easier to collaborate with upstream. Good things will come from this.
Regards Kenneth Nielsen
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/launchpad-users/attachments/20071029/f4d7daa2/attachment-0001.htm