[Sugar-devel] Activity packaging problems

[Jonas Smedegaard]

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Hi,

On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 01:30:30PM +0100, Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote:
>I listed all the problems I'm aware of, which are currently blocking 
>activities packaging:
>
>http://sugarlabs.org/go/DevelopmentTeam/Activities_packaging
>
>If you are packaging activities and you run into any (non distribution 
>specific) issue, please add to the list.

A common issue (so not sure how to best apply it) is copyright and 
licensing info for translations.

Some translations lack such info completely.

Some translations have boilerplate info like this:

# SOME DESCRIPTIVE TITLE. 
# Copyright (C) YEAR THE PACKAGE'S COPYRIGHT HOLDER 
# This file is distributed under the same license as the PACKAGE package. 
# FIRST AUTHOR <EMAIL at ADDRESS>, YEAR. 

Technically distributors must then in principle respect that the file is 
owned by "YEAR THE PACKAGE'S COPYRIGHT HOLDER" who have licensed the 
file similar to "PACKAGE" which does not exist so the file is not FLOSS.


The package maintainer should edit the .pot file to replace these:

  SOME DESCRIPTIVE TITLE
  THE PACKAGE'S COPYRIGHT HOLDER
  PACKAGE

When that is done, they should get in contact with each translator to 
make them adopt that improved boilerplate and themselves replace these:

  FIRST AUTHOR <EMAIL at ADDRESS>
  YEAR

When doing above, it makes good sense to also tidy the gettext hints to 
have proper info too, but that is just nice-to-have for semi-automated 
processing, not crucial as the licensing problem.


I am aware that pootle is used for most translation, and that it does 
not currently handle above properly. Using a machine to help collect 
translations unfortunately cannot excuse licensing issues, so until 
pootle can automate it, I believe it is needed to fix the boilerplate by 
hand.


I am also aware that this whole issue might seem too anal to some. 
Indeed, not all distributors are equally anal/relaxed about licensing. 
And Debian (where I work) is probably at the "hysterical" end of that 
scale.

You may decide to simply ignore this as too much work for too little 
gain, but please beware that then the translation efforts will not reach 
all users of your software, as anal distributors will have to strip 
wrongly licensed translations from their systems.


Kind regards,

  - Jonas

- -- 
* Jonas Smedegaard - idealist og Internet-arkitekt
* Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

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