After having been involved in resolving a couple of translation related snapd issues, there are a few things I wonder about. Talked with @seb128 about it, and he advised me to post here.
If I understand it correctly, Launchpad’s translation interface is intended to serve the whole snapd project for all distros. I noticed @mvo’s sync translations from LP commit, which apparently is the result of a manual translation export from Launchpad. One question is from where exactly.
The translation template, which was created when snapd 2.32+18.04 was built on Ubuntu, is now available to the translators here:
It would be good to have clarified how the project wants to handle the translation management going forward.
The (Ubuntu) package oriented interface has its advantages. snapd’s translation coverage is currently poor in many languages, but I just raised the priority of the snappy template so it appears on the first page of respective language’s overview, for instance:
I believe that will help improving the translation coverage.
Looking forward to your feedback on my questions and thoughts above.
Hey Gunnar! Thanks a lot for your input and help with the translations. I wonder if it would make sense to create translations based on the upstream git master (instead of the 18.04 packages). I guess in practise it does not make much of a difference but it feels cleaner to me to follow git master. This would mean that https://translations.launchpad.net/snapd would be the “canonical” place. Does that make sense?
I would also like to export the translations automatically into a git repo for easy merging. I poked around in LP a bit but it seems like there is no support to export translations into a git repo. That is a bit of a bummer. I think we need some automation here to get the translation updates into our tree.
Hm, it looks like one complication here is that we do not have the pot file in our git tree - we will need to have it in tree if we want to directly import from github.
Probably it makes sense to have a translation interface for upstream git master, and maybe https://translations.launchpad.net/snapd can serve as that as you say. (Saw that you already have uploaded stuff.) How would the translation template there be updated?
In practice I think that https://translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu/bionic/+source/snapd/+pots/snappy will serve as a valuable interface to the translators. Reason: It’s easily found by the Ubuntu translators. (It’s also from there the .po files for Ubuntu’s language packs are exported.) So it would be desirable to set up translation sharing between the two.
However, the (master?) template you uploaded contains 481 strings, while the one based on 2.32 contains 398 strings. I don’t know if automatic translation sharing works if the templates differ.
So there seems to be a few things to look closer into.
I’d like to call your attention to a more urgent translation issue.
I noticed that the translation template created during yesterday’s build of snapd 2.32.5+18.04 for Ubuntu contains 43 strings. The template created when 2.32.3.2+18.04 was built contains 481 strings.
The 43 strings template was imported to Launchpad, so suddenly most of the strings were unavailable to the translators and the langpack builder.
The code for creating snappy.pot is apparently buggy. In an attempt to improve the situation I manually uploaded the 481 strings template for now, so it’s there at next generation of Ubuntu’s language packs the day after tomorrow.
