[Pkg-isocodes-devel] Using several translation sources for iso-codes

[Tobias Quathamer]

Hello fellow maintainers,

I'm currently thinking about using more translation sources for
iso-codes than just the Translation Project. What comes to mind would be
the Debian Pootle server (is that still running, btw?) and Canonical's
Launchpad, which has quite a few translation updates sitting unused (by
us) in their system.

To enable such a system, I propose a different workflow. We would
download an updated po file (e.g. from the TP) and, instead of
overwriting and committing, use a chain of msgcat and msgmerge calls to
extract the translations into our po file. We would then commit the
resulting po file into our repository.

The following example uses tp-de.po as german translation from the
Translation Project, our-de.po as the german translation in our git
repository, and a temporary file.

$ msgcat --use-first tp-de.po our-de.po > temp.po

With --use-first, the TP translation can override any translation in our
po file. This is needed to make updates or corrections of translations
possible. However, if our-de.po contains a fuzzy translation while
tp-de.po only provides an empty string for the same msgid, the empty
string would be used. Therefore, we would need to merge the fuzzy
translation back into our file:

$ msgmerge -U -C our-de.po temp.po iso_3166.pot
$ mv temp.po our-de.po

At this point, our-de.po could be committed. It contains all new
translations as well as updates/corrections of existing translations
while keeping fuzzy entries where applicable.

Now, the same steps could be used with Launchpad, Pootle, and any other
source we might find in future.

There are two problems, however. First, if two sources provide different
translations for the same msgid, the last source wins. But this is a
problem we already have with translations, although on a smaller scale.

Second, the translations from Launchpad have the BSD license, so I'm not
sure if we can just use them in iso-codes (being under LGPL). However,
maybe we should switch the iso-codes license to BSD anyway. As I
understand it, the LGPL already allows the use of iso-codes for non-free
software. The only difference would be that non-free software authors
are currently obligated to share their modifications back to us (with
LGPL), while they would not need to give back with BSD. However, I've
not yet seen any non-free use of iso-codes, so that point is probably
only a theoretical one.

Regards,
Tobias

-- 
Tobias Quathamer | "I never forget a face, but in your case I'll be glad
Hamburg, Germany | to make an exception." -- Groucho Marx

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