Re: Branching - Fedora packages!

[Ankitkumar Rameshchandra Patel <ankit redhat com>]

Miloslav Trmač wrote:

Hello,
Ankitkumar Rameshchandra Patel píše v St 14. 01. 2009 v 20:16 +0530:
  

I am using Fedora 9 system on my personal machine and do not want to 
upgrade to Fedora 10 or rawhide. Recently, I found some translation 
mistakes for some Fedora packages, and want to update the translation 
for those packages packages for Fedora 9 and make it upstream.
    

That rarely works.

  

I think I didn't make it very clear. The context here is for core Fedora packages only, which are maintained on the fedorahosted servers.

Though Gnome, KDE, and other upstream projects have proper branching mechanism, which helps translators to find the right location of translations for previous releases too. So, there is no issue with major upstream projects like Gnome, KDE. Issue is with core fedora packages only.

So, if we would have proper branching for core Fedora packages on fedorahosted VCSs (Version Control Systems) itself, then this issue is solved.

Most packages have upstream either a simple release sequence with no
branches, or they have branches that depend on the release cycle of the
package.  The upstream release cycles are very rarely synchronized with
any distribution (GNOME in Fedora is a sort-of-but-not-really exception)
- and there are many distributions to synchronize with :)

In other words, if you want to update translations of a 1 year old
package, upstream is not very likely to be interested in branching the
package for your distribution version and creating new releases specific
for your distribution.

Maintaining the older versions of a package and backporting any code
fixes is the distribution's job.  The package maintainer of a
distribution may collaborate with upstream on the fix (e.g. submit it to
the upstream "head" version as well), but to fix a package on an older
release of the distribution, the fix is committed on the distribution's
branch of the package, not on upstream branch (there usually isn't any
upstream branch).

I can't see why the same mechanism shouldn't work for translations as
well: Just create an updated .po file (or a patch that only changes a
few specific messages), file a bug at bugzilla.redhat.com asking for a
package update that uses that .po file.  

We have 80+ languages in FLP. and a number of packages.

Translators are not the techies. They can download translation file => translate it => submit it. Doing patches, VCS checkouts, commits tend to reduce their interest. May be existing Fedora translators can deal with these technical challenges but not all the linguist guys who are really interested in helping you out with translations.

This doesn't let you use
transifex's statistics or submission interface - but (at least in
Fedora), translations are very rarely updated for older versions.

I don't see transifex provides the facility to submit translation of packages which are not branched for Fedora 10 or 9 or earlier release.

  (I
guess most translators can find a lot of work that needs doing on the
main branch.)
  

You are right. But, Fedora native language users can make translators work on previous releases! :)

	Mirek
  

Thanks Mirek for your opinion!

-- 
Regards,
Ankit Patel
http://www.indianoss.org/