Improving the translation process

[Julien Lepiller <julien@lepiller.eu>]

Hi guix!

Our current translation process involves sending a source tarball to the TP. Updating a translation is a manual process that can't be done too often, and I don't think the TP is very user friendly. I'd like to set up another service, such as weblate.

The Fedora people have recently switched to it and are inviting other free software projects, so it could be a nice way to setup this new process, before we can make our own service and host it. I've talked with someone responsible for weblate at Fedora, and they would be pleased to help us. We could also apply for the main instance at hosted.weblate.org.

As I see it, we don't want any of these instances to have push rights on our repos. The idea is to have a separately hosted repo for translations, used only by weblate. We would host a bot to regularly  push up-to-date pot files to that intermediate repo, which will update weblate's data. Weblate would push to that repo and any guix commiter would be able to download, check and commit new po files. No commiter would need to have write access to that repo: only the bot and weblate would use it. It could be on savannah or fedora's inhrastructure or somewhere else, but not in the guix namespace at savannah, because access rights are per-namespace iiuc.

This new process would allow for daily or weekly updates of translations, which fits better with our rolling-release model and will help translators of the manual do work on a regular basis instead of per-release. The interface is way more understandable for newcomers who will quickly understand how to contribute. The downside is, as always, more fragmentation in the l10n community esp. if we go for our own instance.

WDYT?