Subject: [bug#37413] [PATCH 0/9] Channel news distribution mechanism

From: "pelzflorian (Florian Pelz)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2019 21:44:16 +0200

I did not want to slow down these useful patches; the news file and
its translations can remain as proposed by Ludo.  How channel authors
translate their news file is their choice.

I thought we can suggest channel authors to use one gettext PO file
containing translations for both the news file and package information
and submit it to the TP.  We can provide scripts to convert to and
from a news file.  Writing such scripts is not hard because PO files
use a simple format.  Guix itself should use this process too.

On Tue, Sep 17, 2019 at 08:21:18PM +0200, Julien Lepiller wrote:
> […]
> Channel translation is another subject, but they could provide their
> own PO file and have them translated separately from the official Guix
> translation process. Guix pull would then concatenate po files from
> every channel and install that. Does it sound good/feasible?
>

I did not think about this before, but Julien’s idea how to process a
channel’s PO files with translations for package descriptions seems
good.  Just msgcat guix-packages and the other channels’ PO files to
the PO file for guix-packages and then run msgfmt on the result.

On Tue, Sep 17, 2019 at 08:21:18PM +0200, Julien Lepiller wrote:
> I partially agree: on the one hand, having our own translation platform
> only increases fragmentation of the free software translation teams,
> and on the other hand, it means we can have a more reactive and
> customized translation process. I also agree with Ludo that the TP is
> probably not the right place for news translations: even if Benno
> accepts the new translations super fast (and Benno is usually fast,
> I just keep making mistakes when submitting a new version), it's
> going to update all translations (guix, guix-packages and guix-manual),
> and translators might focus on these instead of the news.
>

How about adding a comment to the POT file that we wish for
translators to prioritize and urgently add translations for news?  Is
it really necessary to submit the entire Guix tarball to the TP for
updating news; I thought the tarball is just for convenience of
translators?  I wonder what Benno or others from the TP think.  I
think Guix’ goals align well with those of the TP.

> Using a PO file for news items seem a bit drastic too: a news item is
> not supposed to change, except maybe for a typo.
>

PO files are simple and what the Translation Project’s translators are
used to.  I do not understand how another format could be more
appropriate.

Regards,
Florian