CM policy for for svnbook 1.5 translations

[Jens Seidel]

On Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 12:50:29AM -0400, Johans Marvin Taboada Villca wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 7:46 PM, Jens Seidel <jensseidel at users.sf.net> wrote:
> > Ah, forget these. If they are unable to use free software they should not
> > complain.

This was maybe a little bit harsh :-))

> I can't when I'm in the same bag (sadly I admit), besides I'm pretty
> sure it was a valid issue when someone was supposed to validate XML
> sources before committing, that might have been the reason of many
> automated build failures in the past, something that wouldn't occur
> using PO files.

Build errors are possible as still a few XML tags are used in PO
files as well which could be mistranslated. msgfmt is able to check
the validy of C style printf statements (e.g. "%s, %d") in translations
and supports also some other formats (e.g. from the C++ Boost library).
Nevertheless XML is not yet supported. So "Use <option>-u</option>"
could bogusly be translated to "Verwenden Sie <Argument>-u</Argument>".

Maybe po4a can (later) check for this as well ...

Compared to the XML files much fewer tags are used, you will never have
to search for a missing </chapter> od </para> tag which may be hard to
find thousends of lines after the corresponding opening tags.

> Then it's a proven method, and your examples show that translations
> started with XML sources and evolved to PO files.

Yep.

> +1 to PO files.
> 
> > And do you see any specific trouble using PO, would prefer other tools, or
> > do you want to continue with XML (I doubt this after reading your mail)?
> 
> I'm not against PO, it would be great to learn something new. I just

There is not much to learn :-()

> feel a little nostalgic about dropping away previous translation
> efforts, and a little frightened about restarting from the beginning.
> But maybe it's time to leave the past behind and look at the future.

Oh, no!!!!!! You don't have to restart and to drop away previous
translations! These can be reused. It requires a little work but can
be done in a few hours.

Send me you translation together with a *matching* (that's important!)
English source (or even multiple attemps if you worked on multiple
versions) and I can do this for you. See
http://www.red-bean.com/pipermail/svnbook-dev/2008-August/004574.html
for details. (It currently requires po4a but as it's part of Debian it's
no problem for me. Further work doesn't necessarily require po4a such as
XML processing tools are currently not strictly required.)

Jens