Coordinating package meta-data translation

Coordinating package meta-data translation

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello,

The GNU distribution provided by Guix contains package synopses and
descriptions that we would like to translate (see [0] to get an idea.)

For GNU packages, synopses and descriptions are kept in sync with files
from the GNU womb, which are in turn used to generate a web page [1].
Translation of this web page is already handled by the www.gnu.org
translators.

Thus, some synchronization would be needed between the TP and the www
translators.

Any idea/preference on how to proceed?

(Note that the distro also contains synopses and descriptions for
non-GNU packages, which are *not* translated elsewhere.)

Thanks,
Ludo’.

[0] http://www.gnu.org/software/guix/package-list.html
[1] http://www.gnu.org/manual/blurbs.html

Re: Coordinating package meta-data translation

[Benno Schulenberg]

Hello Ludovic,

On 2014-06-06 23:00, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> The GNU distribution provided by Guix contains package synopses 
> and descriptions that we would like to translate (see [0] to get 
> an idea.)

When I first looked at the POT file of guix, about a year ago, I
found it odd that it contained descriptions of some of the packages
that it could install.  To me those descriptions would seem not to
be part of the tool, but part of the things that the tool works on.
So I would have expected them to be in a different POT file, or in
some package database, but not in the POT file of guix.

> For GNU packages, synopses and descriptions are kept in sync with 
> files from the GNU womb, which are in turn used to generate a web 
> page [1]. Translation of this web page is already handled by the 
> www.gnu.org translators.

So these blurbs (package descriptions) are already being translated
into different languages?  Well, then it is clear: remove those
blurbs from the guix POT file, and, if you need them in guix, import
them from the web-translating effort.  If you wish instead the blurbs
to be translated at the TP, then make them into a separate POT file,
say guix-blurbs, not a part of the main guix POT file.  Any existing
translations I can import into the TP.

> Thus, some synchronization would be needed between the TP and the 
> www translators.
> 
> Any idea/preference on how to proceed?

As will be clear from the above, I would not want to synchronize but
draw a strict dividing line: decide who should translate what, and
use those translations everywhere where the strings occur.

> (Note that the distro also contains synopses and descriptions for
>  non-GNU packages, which are *not* translated elsewhere.)

Ehm... which distro do you mean?  Or did you mean to say "any distro"
or "most distros"?

Regards,

Benno

Re: Coordinating package meta-data translation

[Ludovic Courtès]

Saluton, Benno,

Benno Schulenberg <coordinator@translationproject.org> skribis:

> On 2014-06-06 23:00, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>> The GNU distribution provided by Guix contains package synopses 
>> and descriptions that we would like to translate (see [0] to get 
>> an idea.)
>
> When I first looked at the POT file of guix, about a year ago, I
> found it odd that it contained descriptions of some of the packages
> that it could install.  To me those descriptions would seem not to
> be part of the tool, but part of the things that the tool works on.
> So I would have expected them to be in a different POT file, or in
> some package database, but not in the POT file of guix.

I understand it can sound surprising, but Guix is a project to build not
only a package manager, but also a distribution that uses this tool.

Package definitions are in effect “programs”, and Guix is a library they
build upon.  Thus, both are part of the same repository, so they can
evolve together.

>> For GNU packages, synopses and descriptions are kept in sync with 
>> files from the GNU womb, which are in turn used to generate a web 
>> page [1]. Translation of this web page is already handled by the 
>> www.gnu.org translators.
>
> So these blurbs (package descriptions) are already being translated
> into different languages?  Well, then it is clear: remove those
> blurbs from the guix POT file, and, if you need them in guix, import
> them from the web-translating effort.  If you wish instead the blurbs
> to be translated at the TP, then make them into a separate POT file,
> say guix-blurbs, not a part of the main guix POT file.  Any existing
> translations I can import into the TP.

[...]

> As will be clear from the above, I would not want to synchronize but
> draw a strict dividing line: decide who should translate what, and
> use those translations everywhere where the strings occur.

Okay, that makes sense.

Honestly, I’m not thrilled by the idea of having to deal with two
translation sources.

I’d rather kindly invite :-) the www people to get all the translations
from guix.pot, given that it’s a superset of what they need.  It seems
to me that it would be simpler, but what do the www people think?

Or am I unduly scared by the fact that I lack the needed gettext foo?


Besides, would you suggest using different text domains for package
meta-data and for strings of the Guix tools?  (You seemed to imply that
above.)

>> (Note that the distro also contains synopses and descriptions for
>>  non-GNU packages, which are *not* translated elsewhere.)
>
> Ehm... which distro do you mean?  Or did you mean to say "any distro"
> or "most distros"?

I was referring to the distro we’re building: the GNU system.

Thanks,
Ludo’.

Re: Coordinating package meta-data translation

[Benno Schulenberg]

Saluton Ludo',

On 2014-06-09 00:07, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> Saluton, Benno,
> 
> Benno Schulenberg <coordinator@translationproject.org> skribis:
>> As will be clear from the above, I would not want to synchronize but
>> draw a strict dividing line: decide who should translate what, and
>> use those translations everywhere where the strings occur.
> 
> Okay, that makes sense.
> 
> Honestly, I’m not thrilled by the idea of having to deal with two
> translation sources.

It's only slightly harder than dealing with a single source.  You
automate things.  Have a look at the bootstrap script in for example
grep.  All you do is send out a POT file (and in this case two, to
two different addresses), and at the time of rolling a release
tarball, the script takes care of fetching and merging any available
translations.

> Besides, would you suggest using different text domains for package
> meta-data and for strings of the Guix tools?

Precisely.  The ideal would be to have two POT files for Guix, one
with the interface strings, guix.pot, and one with all the package
descriptions, say guix-blurbs.pot.  I would propose to send the first
to the TP, and the second to GNU web translators, as those
strings appear also on the web, and Ineiev says that those texts
must be at least reviewed by the web translators.

Regards,

Benno

Re: Coordinating package meta-data translation

[Ludovic Courtès]

Benno Schulenberg <coordinator@translationproject.org> skribis:

> On 2014-06-09 00:07, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>> Saluton, Benno,
>> 
>> Benno Schulenberg <coordinator@translationproject.org> skribis:
>>> As will be clear from the above, I would not want to synchronize but
>>> draw a strict dividing line: decide who should translate what, and
>>> use those translations everywhere where the strings occur.
>> 
>> Okay, that makes sense.
>> 
>> Honestly, I’m not thrilled by the idea of having to deal with two
>> translation sources.
>
> It's only slightly harder than dealing with a single source.  You
> automate things.  Have a look at the bootstrap script in for example
> grep.  All you do is send out a POT file (and in this case two, to
> two different addresses), and at the time of rolling a release
> tarball, the script takes care of fetching and merging any available
> translations.

OK.

>> Besides, would you suggest using different text domains for package
>> meta-data and for strings of the Guix tools?
>
> Precisely.  The ideal would be to have two POT files for Guix, one
> with the interface strings, guix.pot, and one with all the package
> descriptions, say guix-blurbs.pot.

OK, will do.

> I would propose to send the first to the TP, and the second to GNU web
> translators, as those strings appear also on the web, and Ineiev says
> that those texts must be at least reviewed by the web translators.

Unfortunately, as I wrote, Guix also has descriptions for non-GNU
packages to be translated, which makes this procedure unsuitable.

Or would we need a third text domain?  Or...?

Help welcome!

Ludo’.

Re: Coordinating package meta-data translation

[Benno Schulenberg]

On 2014-06-12 23:49, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> Benno Schulenberg <coordinator@translationproject.org> skribis:
>> I would propose to send the first to the TP, and the second to GNU web
>> translators, as those strings appear also on the web, and Ineiev says
>> that those texts must be at least reviewed by the web translators.
> 
> Unfortunately, as I wrote, Guix also has descriptions for non-GNU
> packages to be translated, which makes this procedure unsuitable.
> 
> Or would we need a third text domain?

Yes, probably.  One for the tool strings, one for the GNU blurbs that
are translated by the web translators, and a third for the non-GNU
blurbs that... you may want to post on the TP.

Benno

Re: Coordinating package meta-data translation

[Ludovic Courtès]

Benno Schulenberg <coordinator@translationproject.org> skribis:

> Precisely.  The ideal would be to have two POT files for Guix, one
> with the interface strings, guix.pot, and one with all the package
> descriptions, say guix-blurbs.pot.

I’ve just done that:

  http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/commit/?id=ee76417972b3a749a28a627c2858c09311d9c0c5

How should I proceed to:

  1. register the new text domain at the TP?

  2. extract already-translated synopses/descriptions and move them to
     po/packages/*.po?

Thanks for your help!

Ludo’.

Re: Coordinating package meta-data translation

[Benno Schulenberg]

Hello Ludo,

On 2014-06-13 17:38, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> I’ve just done that:
> 
>   http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/commit/?id=ee76417972b3a749a28a627c2858c09311d9c0c5

Okay.  The setup is a bit unusual, but... if it works.
(What gettext probably expects is that po is a subdir of the guix
subdir, and that packages is another subdir of that guix subdir,
which (packages) then has its own po subdir.)

> How should I proceed to:
> 
>   1. register the new text domain at the TP?

Slowly!  :)  First let's see what the POT files look like now.
Could you build a preprepre-release tarball and post a URL?
After also having done point 2, of course.

>   2. extract already-translated synopses/descriptions and move them to
>      po/packages/*.po?

First build the POT files, and then change into the po/guix subdir
and run:

for file in *.po;
  do  msgmerge $file ../packages/packages.pot  >../packages/$file;
done

That's all.  You could filter out all the obsolete messages, to have
nice clean files, but you can leave that to the translators too.

Benno

Re: Coordinating package meta-data translation

[Ludovic Courtès]

Saluton Benno,

Benno Schulenberg <coordinator@translationproject.org> skribis:

> On 2014-06-13 17:38, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>> I’ve just done that:
>> 
>>   http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/commit/?id=ee76417972b3a749a28a627c2858c09311d9c0c5
>
> Okay.  The setup is a bit unusual, but... if it works.
> (What gettext probably expects is that po is a subdir of the guix
> subdir, and that packages is another subdir of that guix subdir,
> which (packages) then has its own po subdir.)

Yup it works, and I prefer it this way.

>> How should I proceed to:
>> 
>>   1. register the new text domain at the TP?
>
> Slowly!  :)  First let's see what the POT files look like now.
> Could you build a preprepre-release tarball and post a URL?
> After also having done point 2, of course.

Here it is:

  http://www.fdn.fr/~lcourtes/software/guix/guix-0.6.90.tar.gz
  SHA1: 0add82cffccde09aa0801e0974aaa61e29dc8bef
  http://www.fdn.fr/~lcourtes/software/guix/guix-0.6.90.tar.gz.sig

>>   2. extract already-translated synopses/descriptions and move them to
>>      po/packages/*.po?
>
> First build the POT files, and then change into the po/guix subdir
> and run:
>
> for file in *.po;
>   do  msgmerge $file ../packages/packages.pot  >../packages/$file;
> done

Done:

  http://git.sv.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/commit/?id=240a2775ded34730607b00eb1a77f2d1989f4011

> That's all.  You could filter out all the obsolete messages, to have
> nice clean files, but you can leave that to the translators too.

Let’s do that, then.  ;-)

Thanks for helping out!

Ludo’.

Re: Coordinating package meta-data translation

[Benno Schulenberg]

Saluton Ludoviko,

On 2014-06-14 22:57, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> Here it is:
> 
> http://www.fdn.fr/~lcourtes/software/guix/guix-0.6.90.tar.gz

Okay.  Looks good.  On second thought, it would probably be better to
filter out the obsolete messages for each domain.  In both po/guix
and po/packages you could run this:

for file in *.po;
  do msgattrib --no-obsolete $file >pof;
  mv pof $file;
done

Also, in the po/*/Makevars files you may want to add --no-wrap to
the XGETTEXT_OPTIONS.  It makes the POT files look better.  And
then add MSGMERGE_OPTIONS = --no-wrap too, because all the PO files
on the TP are msgmerged with that option and if you don't it will
create a lot of unneeded wrapping and unwrapping in the commits of
the PO files.

As far as I can tell the guix-packages.pot file now contains only
descriptions of GNU packages, so you would want that POT file to be
translated by the web translators, no?  It should not be registered
at the TP, right?

By the way, I saw the term "narinfo" somewhere, and then had to dig
through the source a bit to learn that "nar" stands for Nix archive.
A translator comment might be useful there.

Regards,

Benno

Re: Coordinating package meta-data translation

[Ludovic Courtès]

Saluton Benno,

Benno Schulenberg <coordinator@translationproject.org> skribis:

> On 2014-06-14 22:57, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>> Here it is:
>> 
>> http://www.fdn.fr/~lcourtes/software/guix/guix-0.6.90.tar.gz
>
> Okay.  Looks good.  On second thought, it would probably be better to
> filter out the obsolete messages for each domain.  In both po/guix
> and po/packages you could run this:
>
> for file in *.po;
>   do msgattrib --no-obsolete $file >pof;
>   mv pof $file;
> done

Done.

> Also, in the po/*/Makevars files you may want to add --no-wrap to
> the XGETTEXT_OPTIONS.  It makes the POT files look better.  And
> then add MSGMERGE_OPTIONS = --no-wrap too, because all the PO files
> on the TP are msgmerged with that option and if you don't it will
> create a lot of unneeded wrapping and unwrapping in the commits of
> the PO files.

Makes sense, done.

> As far as I can tell the guix-packages.pot file now contains only
> descriptions of GNU packages,

No, it also contains non-GNU packages (I initially populated POTFILES
with just some packages, and then stopped when I learned the www team
had started doing the same thing in parallel.)

> so you would want that POT file to be translated by the web
> translators, no?  It should not be registered at the TP, right?

Well, I need to think more about a solution to this problem.  Adding a
3rd text domain is OKish, but not satisfying; having to separate GNU
packages from non-GNU packages in .scm files is inconvenient at best.

> By the way, I saw the term "narinfo" somewhere, and then had to dig
> through the source a bit to learn that "nar" stands for Nix archive.
> A translator comment might be useful there.

Indeed.  It turns out that term shouldn’t even leak to the user, so I’ve
changed it.

That said, there may be other places were a translator comment would help.

Thanks!

Ludo’.