Restricted access to .po files annoys developers

[Jordi Mallach]

On Wed, Sep 06, 2006 at 01:29:06PM +0100, Tim Müller wrote:
> I'm the 'annoyed developer' referenced in the subject who wrote this :)

Aha! I figured you'd be listening somewhere. :)

> It was possible at some point. Not only do I remember it, I also wrote a
> script to pull updates from Rosetta and put it into my application's CVS
> repository and used it for a while. The po files were available at
> 
> https://launchpad.ubuntu.com/rosetta/products/$package/$template/$languagecode/po
> 
> back then. Not that it really matters, it's just not that I'm making
> this up entirely ;)

Okay, I stand corrected. I actually remember this now. :) It was,
obviously, before the url to the file was mailed, so no validated email
needed to be know by Rosetta.

> As far as I can see, any reasons not to provide direct non-authorised
> download locations for .po files or tarballs thereof are purely of a
> non-technical nature. Technically, it would surely be feasible to either
> put regularly updated snapshot tarballs somewhere at a predefined
> location or have the server generate tarballs or individual .po files on
> the fly from the database. If it's worth the effort is another question
> of course, but the fact remains that this was possible at some point in
> the past and is not any longer. Seems just that either no one noticed or
> no one bothered to complain about it :)

I need input from danilo and carlos to see if it'd be possible to make
this available in a per-product, per-template, opt-in way.

> Indeed, you are quite right, and I apologise for spreading wrong
> information.
> 
> It appears I was simply too dumb to find this. I was looking at an
> individual translation and then picked the 'Download' option from the
> menu in the left. When you do that, it only asks you whether you want
> a .po or an .mo file and doesn't give you the option to download all
> translations together. And I didn't notice that the menu changed to
> 'Download translations' when I went back to the package page (since it
> always says 'Overview', I didn't realise it was contextual). Again,
> apologies. Seems obvious in retrospect :)

Yeah, in the "viewing just one language" context, I'd expect that
"Download" will offer me that language, with no other questions.

> Exports in form of single tarball with all .po files are quite
> acceptable to me and I'm glad someone dug further and it turns out I was
> wrong. Rosetta is an exciting platform for translations and I hope it
> will stay open to outside developers like me who would like to make use
> of it for their translation needs.
> 
> Having said that, it would be nice if you at some point added back
> direct access to translation data again. IMHO translation data, esp.
> data that has been created by a community of external translators,
> should be available and accessible directly in the same way that patches
> in bugzilla/launchpad, package source code and package diffs are
> accessible. At least that's how I feel.

Thanks. We can look into your first issue and see if there would be a
way of improving this. Let's see what Carlos and Danilo think.

Jordi
-- 
Jordi Mallach Pérez  --  Debian developer     http://www.debian.org/
jordi at sindominio.net     jordi at debian.org     http://www.sindominio.net/
GnuPG public key information available at http://oskuro.net/
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