[Mailman-i18n] Move to Launchpad?

[David Planella]

Hi Barry and all,

2009/7/21 Barry Warsaw <barry at list.org>:
> Now that Launchpad is free software, we should consider whether to move
> translations there.  While I greatly appreciate Cristobal's gracious
> donation of a Pootle server to the project, I'm not sure we've had much
> traction with it.  I'll regrettably take responsibility for not helping to
> push that more.
>
> http://wiki.list.org/display/DEV/2009/07/21/Launchpad+is+Free+Software
>
> I am interested in what developers (e.g. Mark) and translators alike think
> about such a move, and we have several options.  We could move all
> translations to LP, only future (read: Mailman 2.2 and/or 3.0) translations
> there, or nothing.  I don't want to make this decision alone -- I like to
> get as much consensus as possible from everyone who would be affected by the
> change.
>

As a Mailman translator, this (and anything which might lower the
entry barrier for translators) gets a big +1 from me.

The method we've followed for the last two releases in the Catalan
team has been to do our translations on our own bzr branch, which
tracks the corresponding Mailman branch, and then request for a merge
before each release. While I must admit that it has worked well, it
has added quite a lot of overhead on our part and certainly enough to
scare off potential contributors, even though we've thoroughly
documented the process. Now I realise we could have created a
dedicated project for translation and just have uploaded the
templates, but that'd still be additional work for translators, which
would have to track each release and upload the corresponding
templates manually.

If the final decision is to use Launchpad for translations as well,
I'd suggest to publish all branches for translations (2.1, 2.2 and
3.0), clearly indicating the status of each version (e.g. development
focus, future development, maintenance-only) in the description of the
translation template. The (relatively) new feature [1] [2] of
automatically uploading new translation templates upon commit on a bzr
branch would certainly make this easier. Message sharing between
branches is also an interesting feature not yet widely announced but
already in use. It effectively allows translations to be automatically
shared across branches, which for translators means that they only
have to translate in one branch and those translations with identical
msgids will be instantly translated in the other branches.

Then again, I feel I must warn that I might be a bit biased, since I
also work for Canonical as the Ubuntu Translations Coordinator :-).

> If there are concerns, questions, or complaints about Launchpad's
> translation services, feel free to bring that up here or in the Launchpad
> public forums.  I'll answer as best I can or find an expert on that part of
> the system.  From my perspective, it would be nice to re-integrate this part
> of the development/release cycle.
>

Or on IRC for those who prefer it: #launchpad on Freenode. I'm usually
there (dpm) but most importantly the Launchpad Translations developers
are also there, and we're always glad to help with any questions or
requests.

Regards,
David.

[1] http://blog.launchpad.net/translations/import-translation-templates-from-your-projects-bazaar-branches
[2] http://blog.launchpad.net/translations/importing-translations-and-translation-templates