[Sugar-devel] i18n improvement experiment

[Aleksey Lim]

On Thu, Aug 11, 2011 at 08:11:08AM -0400, Walter Bender wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 11, 2011 at 7:59 AM, Aleksey Lim <alsroot at activitycentral.org>wrote:
> 
> > 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
> >
> 
> +1 to adding both keys to activity.info, but I am not sure that this will
> help the translators as it won't be in a form that would get picked up by
> gettext.

The process is that pootle (like bundlebuilder.py) just places activity
name directly to .pot files. So, it will do the same for home page hint.

-- 
Aleksey