[Mailman-i18n] Should we join the Translation Project?

[Simone Piunno]

On Friday 10 October 2003 21:05, Barry Warsaw wrote:

> One of the biggest pains for me lately has been managing the .po file
> catalogs across the HEAD and the 2.1-maint branch.

Personally I wouldn't have problems managing HEAD and 2.1-maint for italian as 
two different file sets, tracked separately, and in fact I'm already doing 
this since at least 2.1.1 (you should have noted I always commit changes to 
the right branch or to both).

If you leave us this burden you won't have to backport anymore, but I don't 
know if other translators would feel like it.

> We had talked before about moving Mailman's i18n work to
> the Translation Project[1], and I think now's the perfect time to
> revisit that.
> I don't have any direct experience with TP, so first, I'm wondering who
> out there has, and what you think about it.  

I have no experience with TP (even if I'm enlisted in their site)  and I'm 
neutral on this.  I even signed their disclaimer.

http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~gnutra/HTML/disclaim.html

> The alternative for going to TP would be for me to pull the messages
> subdir out of the top-level directory, and manage that outside of any
> CVS branches.

Where's the difference between this option and just stopping backports, 
letting us track branches as different trees?

> The other i18n change I'm planning is to adopt ZPT for the templates.  I
> think we don't have to wait for MM3.0 for that, and it will have many
> great advantages.  For i18n, the major advantages is that it means you
> will no longer have to translate whole templates -- we can mark
> translatable strings in the ZPT, and extract them to the .pot file, so
> there's only one set of texts you need to translate.

I have experience with ZPT-i18n only through plone+localizer.  In my 
experience, translating a full text (as a full template) is way easier than 
translating small pieces (like in .po), even when the full text is intermixed 
with tags.
Furthermore, AFAIK marking in ZPT is tricky and error prone.
On the plus side, separating template structure from strings is good for 
stability, cause then you're free to change the english template and the new 
structure will be immediatly available for other languages.

Regards,
  Simone
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