Re: [Scrollkeeper-devel] Czech translation of scrollkeeper

[Malcolm T. <ma...@co...>]

On Tue, Dec 17, 2002 at 06:39:52PM -0600, Dan Mueth wrote:
> Good point.  I think this is the first ScrollKeeper CVS account for a 
> translater, but then we also get translations emailed to us.  So, there is 
> still a possibility of a collision.  Plus, even with a single CVS system, 
> two people could still check out and translate at the same time.

With a single CVS system, you usually have translation "teams" to avoid
the collision problem. Within any given language team, the members work
out who translates which packages. But if we are going to allow mailed
in translations as well, then it is just going to require care on our
part. Committing any new translations as soon as they arrive will help
ease the liklihood of collisions and we can deal with the corner cases
as they arrive.

> How about we let people use either GNOME or SourceForge CVS as they like
> (perhaps encouraging people to use GNOME CVS), or even just email the
> translations.  However, they should always make sure they start with the
> .po file out of one of the two CVS systems (ie. not from a release).  
> Then, anybody who commits a .po file to CVS make sure they add the same
> .po file to both CVS accounts.

This sounds messy and it won't work like you think. Imagine that
somebody from the Swedish team commits a translated (po) file to
extra-po. This person will not have a sourceforge account. So somebody
(me?) has to watch for that commit and then commit the same file to
sourceforge.

Similarly, if somebody is committing directly to sourceforge, there is
almost certainly going to be a collision with GNOME CVS, since the GNOME
guys are way too keen about translating stuff. It won't do any good to
put a README in the extra-po module at GNOME CVS saying something like
"don't translate for fr_CA locale", because it won't get read. The
translators just tend to go on autopilot (which, given the number of
strings and modules they translate, is not unreasonable).

> This makes more work for people who work with CVS, but makes things
> simpler for translators and allows people to still use gnome-extra, which
> means we get a lot more translations done than if we just used
> SourceForge.
> 
> Or is there a simpler way?

I cannot think of a solution at the moment. I'll think about it a bit,
but I think anything involving two CVS repositories is going to involve
a bit of hackiness. I don't think this is entirely bad, since I agree
that getting as many translations as possible is good and I don't want
to alienate those who are translating and mailing in their contributions
to you. But we need to work out something that we can use consistently
to avoid annoying people.


Will cogitate a bit,
Malcolm

-- 
Tolkien is hobbit-forming.