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

From: Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 Sep 2019 11:12:31 +0200

Hello,

Julien Lepiller <[email-masked]> skribis:

>> I do not know what Benno thinks about this.  I would prefer this to be
>> handled by some Translation Project eventually.

You mean by some external project focused on translation, not
necessarily by the Translation Project, right?

> 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.
>
> 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.

Yeah.  Another issue is that you don’t want translators to spend time
translating news from last year.  News translation is very much
now-or-never.

> 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?

This patch set adds a single mechanism to distribute news alongside a
channel, be it the 'guix channel or another channel, and I think that’s
a good thing.

If we want to preserve this property, any solution that special-cases
the 'guix channel won’t work.

Also, when I wrote that switching to PO files would introduce technical
challenges, I really mean it.  :-)  For example, how would
‘.guix-channel’ specify where PO files for its news are to be found?
Would ‘.guix-channel’ also have to specify a text domain?  How would we
compile PO files to .mo/.gmo such that gettext can actually find these
things at run time?  What if a channel specifies a text domain already
used for something else?  Do we really want to tell channel authors to
fiddle with a workflow as complex as gettext + TP?  And so on.

Thanks,
Ludo’.

PS: Please trim quotes a bit when replying.  :-)