[Sugar-devel] Splitting up Honey on Pootle - proposal for discussion

[Chris Leonard]

On Pootle, the Honey project has now grown to contain 68 Activities
(totalling 16,310 words in 6,442 strings) in 102 languages.

http://translate.sugarlabs.org/projects/honey/

I would like to discuss breaking breaking Honey into at least two
sections.  There are several reasons this would be desirable.

1) Refreshing each of these 102 languages from templates whenever any
Honey activity has a string change places a considerable burden on the
server resources and, in particular, on my time.  They cannot be fired
off all at once as it is a drain on system resources and with some
frequency, a refresh will simply fail part of the way through,
requiring multiple passes to assure that all languages are updated to
their full complement of strings.  This has become fairly
time-consuming manual maintenance process.

1) It would be desirable to gently focus L10n effort on the most used,
most valued, most downloaded, most educational, most (insert your
favorite adjective here) Activities first, before moving on to
Activities that although it is very much appreciated that the
developer has taken care to build in i18n, will just not have the same
impact in the classroom as some other activity.  No offense meant, but
kids will use the Record activity long before they are looking for a
python debugger, both are important and valued, but I think it is
simply realistic to accept that one may have a higher a priority in a
localizer's workflow, given the limited L10n resources present in some
of our more exotic languages and the fact that we are adding new
languages all the time that are targeting specific deployment needs.

Walter and I touched base on this briefly and he has taken a first
rough pass at his thinking on the subject.

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Talk:Translation_Team#Honey_reorganization

No need to keep the discussion of the wiki page, the mailing list is
fine, but the proposal needed to be hung somewhere for viewing.

Walter split the existing Honey into Honey and 'Maple Syrup" projects,
I am agnostic with respect to the nomenclature and do not want to
paint that particular bikeshed myself.  I would raise the possibility
that perhaps one or two Honey Activities might have earned graduation
to Fructose, but again, I have no strong feelings on that.  I am
really focused on the pragmatic issues of Pootle maintenance and L10n
prioritization without wishing to ruffle the feathers of any Activity
developers.

Please provide any feedback, positive or otherwise so we can begin to
move to address the practical problems that exists in a manner
consistent with our commitment to openly discuss any such issues in a
productive manner.

Warmest Regards,

cjl
Sugar Labs Translation Team Coordinator

P.S. While Etoys is also large, it only updates it's POT infrequently
and it all happens at once, so it does not present an issue comparable
to Honey's high rate of change on individual elements.