[Sugar-devel] i18n improvement experiment

[Aleksey Lim]

On Thu, Aug 11, 2011 at 01:55:57AM -0400, Chris Leonard wrote:
> Dear Activity developers,
> 
> I'm not 100% sure if this will work, but I'd like to try it out with
> one activity to test it.
> 
> Generally, the first line of any POT file is the Actviity name, which
> is typically picked up from the activity.info file (specifically
> activity/activity.info:2), although it sometimes also appears
> elsewhere in the activity's code .
> 
> e.g.
> 
> #: activity/activity.info:2 exporthtml.py:96 PortfolioActivity.py:295
> msgid "Portfolio"
> msgstr "
> 
> #: activity/activity.info:2
> msgid "Calculate"
> msgstr ""
> 
> What I am wondering is if it is possible to insert a TRANS comment in
> the activity.info file that would contain the link to the Activity's
> homepage on the Sugar Labs wiki.
> 
> #. TRANS: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Portfolio
> 
> #. TRANS: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Calculate
> 
> What I am basically getting at is a way to associating the wiki
> homepage information with the Actvity name string in the PO file in
> order to give localizers additional textual context to review before
> doing the localization.  In an ideal world, localizers would play
> around with the actifvity itself before localizing to get context, but
> until we get a better SOAS version available, we have to accept that
> not all localizers will have an XO laptop at hand or be Linux gurus
> pulling Sugar packages from their distros.
> 
> As an example of a truly informative activity.info file, see the
> activity.info file of the TamTamSuite:
> 
> http://git.sugarlabs.org/tamtam/tamtam/blobs/master/activity/activity.info
> 
> Walter, you may want to do something like this if/when you roll
> multiple TurtleArt-related components into one PO file the way Aleksey
> did with TamTamSuite.
> 
> I don't see the "homepage" field described on the page below, but it
> doesn't seem to break anything, but I wouldn't know how to parse it
> int oa translators' comment.
> 
> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Development_Team/Almanac/Activity_Bundles
> 
> If anyone can describe a better way of accomplishing the same goal, I
> would love to hear about it, otherwise, I would like to collaborate
> with an activty developer to experiment with attempting to insert a
> developer's comment for translators into an acitvity.info file to see
> if we can provide an enhanced reference link in the PO file for
> localizers.  Testing to include making hte edits, regenerating the
> POT, pulling to Poolte, refreshing langs in Pootle and testing rebuilt
> activity to make sure this insertion doesn't have unintended
> side-effects.
> 
> Any volunteers?  If we can make this work, I'd like to make this an
> "i18n best practice" for activity.info files.

The first line in .pot files is being generated by setup.py
(activitybundler.py) and will be regenerated by pootle's script (that's
doing the same), ie, it can be improved to add home page.

The problem is that existed activity.info spec doesn't have home page
info. The format that was used for TamTam is a new sweets recipe
specification [1] that extends currnet one to make it useful in
Sugar Packaging Management System (sweets).

In any case, we can ask activity developers to add homepage key to
current acitvity.info files. And, like with license key (still in
progress), ASLO can check upoaded activities for that key to be sure
that it exists. So, we can speed up adopting this key by activity
developers and improve i18n.

[1] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Platform_Team/Recipe_Specification

-- 
Aleksey