[Sugar-devel] Terminal Activity strings

[James Cameron]

On Thu, Apr 07, 2016 at 01:20:42AM -0400, Chris Leonard wrote:
> Dear Sugar developers,
> 
> The Terminal Activity is going to get a new version release in the
> very near future.  [...]

I've been pushing this because I'm hoping to include a fix which is
merged but not yet released.  65f732d ('fix terminal not stopping on
child exit').

> As you know, this is a core activity providing access to the Linux
> command line.  It used to have very few, very simple, but very
> important strings.
> 
> Terminal
> Zoom out
> Zoom in
> Fullscreen
> Open New Tab
> Close Tab
> Previous Tab
> Next Tab
> 
> Apparently in the course of the gtk3 port, some of these strings
> went away
> 
> Open New Tab
> Close Tab
> Previous Tab
> Next Tab
> 
> which seems a little strange to me, I haven't tested the new code,
> but I'm not sure how or why these strings (which I think may have
> been tooltips) went away.

A quick test would be to bring up SoaS Fedora 23 in a virtual machine,
and start Terminal.

Yes, they went away, the functions were removed at that point,
because the Gtk3 notebook widget includes those functions.

p.s. should you try SoaS, ignore the strange noisy shell prompt; the
incomplete addition of desktop notification for command completion,
bugs.sugarlabs.org #4844, bugzilla.redhat.com #1220006.

> See new strings here by looking at any language
> 
> http://translate.sugarlabs.org/projects/Terminal/
> 
> Now instead of 15 words, it has ballooned to 121 words with the
> addition of some help text.  I'm not against adding help text, but I
> do think a change this big merits some discussion and review.  [...]

It was discussed and reviewed at the time;
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2012-June/038188.html

Patch was proposed by Agustin Zubiaga, reviewed by S. Daniel Francis,
Paul Fox, and Rafael Ortiz.

(It was written by Gonzalo, according to the commit message and
copyright of the added .py file, but it must have been off-list.)

> The old string set was really easy to localize because these exact
> strings were widely pre-localized in the upstream projects that
> contribute to Poolte's translation memory (TM).

That's nice.

> I'd like to to ask whether we lost functionality along with the loss
> of the strings about tabs.

Yes, but I'm not worried.  We've ended up with mildly discoverable
shortcuts instead.

> Can we do anything to improve these strings?

Remove the help text?  The Help button might activate the Help
Activity instead, (shortcut alt+shift+h), the new home for in-activity
help, but not sure if Help is in the translation infrastructure; it
isn't in the pull-down menu on your referenced page!

https://github.com/godiard/help-activity

The Terminal section of Help Activity also needs a few updates; it is
overly XO and Fedora specific.  I tried rewriting it yesterday, but
couldn't bring myself to tell children to use pwd, ls, or rm.  ;-}

> For instance, this one uses incorrect English grammar:
> Locations: terminal.py:236
> 
> List the content of a directory.

Originating authors may not have been English as first language
speakers.

> The plural form "contents" would be better in this string.  Admittedly
> that by itself is a small thing and an easy fix, but I would like to
> ask folks to look at this code to see if we cqn improve the i18n of
> any strings.  Some of the help strings do not appear to be all that
> helpful and it is not entirely clear if some would actually be
> translated at all (e.g. cd).
> 
> I would very much appreciate some additional eyes on this, keeping
> translation in mind.

Thanks for looking into this, hope I've helped.

> 
> Regards,
> 
> cjl

-- 
James Cameron
http://quozl.netrek.org/