[Debian-l10n-devel] Porting the mail interface, or not (ddtp.debian.org)

Martin Eberhard Schauer Martin.E.Schauer at gmx.de
Sun Jul 29 13:51:09 UTC 2012


Martijn van Oosterhout wrote:
>>      
> Ok, I took another look and I found some emails. The system seems to
> be handling 99% spam, but I found a few others. However, I only really
> found uploading of descriptions, no GETs. How are you getting the text
> to translate and send? Building the emails by hand?
>    
There are several ways for producing the uploads:

- manual copy of recently translated material
- manual download of some package of interest, e.g.
   postfix-pcre:
   http://ddtp.debian.net/ddt.cgi?package=postfix-pcre
   http://ddtp.debian.net/ddt.cgi?desc_id=69705&getuntrans=de
- scripted download with wget
   Here the background is a script by Davide Prina. It parses
   the Translation-xx file and generates lists of descriptions to
   retranslate, partly translated descriptions and entirely new
   descriptions.
   I made some scripts to compare these lists with recent popcon
   data. And I've a script for downloading one ore more descriptions
   using wget.
> Is that the use case, getting through simple changes? In that case
> what you really want is that a "coordinator" can do "force submit" or
> some such. Would that cover it?
>    
It is one use case. Some of the retrieved descriptions I consider
to be so trivial that I don't bother the other reviewers with them
and upload directly, other descriptions are fed into the DDTSS.
> There is also a response from one person who would like to use the
> mail interface. Given that we can open the discussion about whether it
> should look like the current interface or start using PO files. I have
> no experience with them myself but I'm told they are the standard way
> of handling translations.
>    
What I found inconvenient was getting descriptions via the mail
interface. In the beginning I used it quite a lot, but it seems that
it only can provide one ore more random descriptions, not specific
ones. And it was not really convenient to write a mail, get my mails,
and separately storing the attachments because I did not investigate
ways of scripting this process.

Certainly this would be some kind of unification. Program messages,
debconf templates and manual pages (via po4a) are handled with PO
files. PO files consist of a header (comment lines with copyright
information) and msgid/msgstr pairs. The first pair has a special format
(msgid empty, msgstr with information on package and translation).

The rest of the PO file consists of groups with original (msgid) und 
translated
(msgstr) material, e.g.:

msgid "Linux Programmer's Manual"
msgstr "Linux-Programmierhandbuch"

At present I don't see the improvement in changing to PO files for the 
DDTSS.
But perhaps others have a better idea of the possible consequences.



More information about the Debian-l10n-devel mailing list