[IAEP] Testing of Activities

[Chris Leonard]

On Wed, Apr 19, 2017 at 1:30 AM, Tony Anderson <tony_anderson at usa.net> wrote:
> I spent the last two plus days testing the 137 activities with repositories
> in github/sugarlabs.

Thank you for this effort, clearly additional follow up is required
and I hope it occurs.

> Localization also needs some attention. The setup.py enables a developer to
> generate a master Pot file while building a bundle for release to ASLO. That
> is probably the limit of the developer's responsibility. However, existing
> activities over time have developed localization for many languages. Changes
> to the messages will need new translations. Perhaps the developer can use
> diff to find differences in the Pot and to eliminate un-needed changes and
> test that new messages are passed through. This could enable prompt release
> of a new version without waiting for the localization team to provide
> translations for dozens of languages.

For a very long time, instructions to developers have been "run the
POT generation and never ever touch anything in the PO directory
again, The L10n team will take care of the rest of it for you.".
Unfortunately over the course of time, with changes in Pootle
versions, migration of our repositories to GitHub and the decay of a
"pootle-helpers" script set originally created by Sayamindu Dasgupta,
the early tight and hands-free integration between Pootle and the
repos has suffered and much of the process has returned to manual
intervention.  The best path back to such a L10n nirvana is an
upcoming release of Pootle (ver 2.8) that brings back repo integration
through the implementation of the pootle-fs file system.

At the present time if the messages of an activity are being changed,
we are still dependent upon periodic refreshes of the POT file which
can be accomplished with "setup.py genpot".  I manually upload that
renewed template to Pootle and refresh the existing PO files from the
template and call for completion of any new strings.  With the
gracious help of James Cameron in generating refreshed POT files, this
process has been initiated (and substantially completed) for the
entire Fructose collection and I am systematically committing the
refreshed PO files to the GitHub repos.(feel free to examine/monitor
pull request activity by github user leonardcj).

https://github.com/leonardcj?tab=overview&from=2017-01-01&to=2017-01-31&utf8=%E2%9C%93

As for suggesting the reuse of strings common to already translated
activities, this is clearly a "best i18n practice", that should be
encouraged.

I do envision sheparding us back to an enlightened era where
developers largely can expect localizers to take care of things for
them (primarily through a migration to the 2.8 version of pootle when
finally released (or possibly 2.8.1 bug fix version if one follows
traditional Microsoft upgrade best practices).  Ideally, Pootle would
take care of POT regeneration on the backend, as we used to have it
do.

cjl