[Debian-l10n-commits] r1222 - /reports/todo/debconf8_i18n.txt

Sun Aug 24 06:27:34 UTC 2008

Author: bubulle
Date: Sun Aug 24 06:27:34 2008
New Revision: 1222

URL: http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/?sc=1&rev=1222
Log:
Add early version of the Debconf8 report

Added:
    reports/todo/debconf8_i18n.txt

Added: reports/todo/debconf8_i18n.txt
URL: http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/reports/todo/debconf8_i18n.txt?rev=1222&op=file
==============================================================================

--- reports/todo/debconf8_i18n.txt (added)
+++ reports/todo/debconf8_i18n.txt Sun Aug 24 06:27:34 2008
@@ -1,0 +1,134 @@
+During Debconf 8, a lot of work happened around i18n, either during Debcamp,
+informal sessions during Debconf and four formal 1-hour sessions.
+
+i18n work session 1: infrastructure
+-----------------------------------
+
+During that work session, several contributors of Debian i18n
+presented the recent progress about i18n infrastructure in Debian, 
+mostly the dedicated server named "churro", aka i18n.debian.net.
+
+churro is hosted in Merida, Extremadura, Spain, since September 2006, the
+first i18n session held in Extremadura.
+
+Since then, several services were developed on churro (see #FIXME#):
+
+Nicolas FranÃ§ois summarized the work around l10n material collection.
+Several scripts on churro gather the translation material and process it to
+provide:
+
+- access for translators to this material
+- various statistics pages
+
+**
+
+Christian Perrier gave a summary about Pootle, the web interface
+that allows access to l10n material as well as (potentially). Pootle is now
+directly hooked to VCS repositories of Debian Installer as well as related
+projects. Some teams began working with it to access the material. It still
+needs very close monitoring, still, to manually handle possible conflicts.
+
+Some experimental scripts are also currently running to gather all
+po-debconf l10n material, commit it to debian-l10n SVN repository, with
+Pootle hooked on it. Translators do not have access to this, though, because
+we need to figure out how maintainers could easily get that material (for
+instance by having debhelper scripts that could gather it at build time, or
+similar solutions).
+
+We now need to more closely define the administrators for Pootle, if it
+becomes a production service (as it is partly, already, for D-I).
+
+**
+
+Michael Bramer gave the status of the DDTP (packages descriptsions
+translation project). Everything is now installed on churro since December
+2007, including the web interface (DDTSS) developed by #FIXME#.
+
+Future projects include the sync of translated descriptions with the archive
+(see the detailed section about this later in this report) as well as
+import/export of PO files, possibly hooked on Pootle (however, that leads to
+severe performance issues).
+
+**
+
+Nicolas FranÃ§ois showed the status of "tracking robots" that allow the most
+organised l10n teams to track down their work with special-formatted mails
+sent to their respective mailing lists. Recent weeks have seen Nicolas
+merging together several scripts that were running by a few teams in a
+general-purpose tracking robot that runs on churro (#FIXME# URL)
+
+**
+
+Christian Perrier showed recent evolutions on compendia creation. Compendia
+are a collection of already translated strings, assembled in big PO files,
+that can be used by translation teams to make the translation of new
+material easier. The initial work by Eddy Petriso is now running as a
+general service on churro (#FIXME# URL)
+
+**
+
+Felipe Augusto van de Wiel summarized the status of the server
+administration and hosting. The server is hosted in the facilities of the
+Region of Extremadura. It is administered by Felipe, Christian Perrier,
+CÃ©sar Gomez Martin (as local contact) and Nicolas FranÃ§ois.
+
+The server adminstration communication channel is the
+debian-l10n-devel at lists.alioth.debian.org mailing list and #debian-i18n on
+irc.debian.org. Nicolas and Felipe will setup IRC meetings between them
+every 2 weeks.
+
+A lot of work was done during Debcamp by Felipe and Nicolas to organize the
+various scripts and robots in a cleaner way, to allow redundancy in server
+and scripts monitoring.
+
+The general goal is to have a "DSA-quality" server and progressively runs
+all service in the most professionnal way. Philosophically speaking, we
+target to transform i18n.debian.net into i18n.debian.org, ie an official
+service of the project.
+
+i18n work session 1: tdebs
+--------------------------
+(notes taken by Marc Hymers)
+
+Notes
+Various constraints and desirable characteristics were discussed 
+Out-of-band translation updates 
+Only installing useful translations on systems 
+Reducing bandwidth usage 
+Avoiding archive bloat 
+Discussion noted that "Reducing bandwidth usage" by providing small,
+individual tdebs per package per architecture and "Avoiding archive
+bloat" were contradictory. Instead it was suggested that one .tdeb per
+source package would be provided, including all translations, and that
+dpkg class support should be added to allow filtering at install time.
+
+Summary
+One tdeb per source package 
+
+dpkg class support needed; see http://www.dpkg.org/dpkg/Classes
+(possible uses go way beyond translation, e.g. tagging doc files)
+
+Using the class support, .tdebs would be easily splittable into
+smaller, per language tdebs. This may be considered at stable
+releases.
+
+Translators would be able to use +t[0-9]+ syntax to indicate
+translation updates (similar to bin-nmu style versioning)
+
+Translation-Version: would be used in Packages files to indicate the
+most up-to-date tdeb instead of having full Package: entries
+
+This work is aimed at lenny+2 due to the changes needed in the deb toolchain 
+
+There needs to be discussion with the dpkg, apt, debian-installer and
+debhelper people.
+
+ftpmaster is happy with the one tdeb per source package and +t[0-9]+ syntax 
+
+The plan is to meet in Extremedura (post-lenny) to continue the
+discussion and start the work.
+
+Post-discussion notes
+
+For new translations, we'll need some form of source; to be decided
+(noted by weasel / Ganneff)


