Re: [Freedos-devel] Translations (was: Re: Missing FDOS utilities)

[thraex]

On 19.05.2020 18:12, Eric Auer wrote:

> Which leads to the question why Mateusz abandoned it in 2016.
> Either it was too much work or there were too few fresh text
> translations coming in per period of time to maintain it?

Sorry for my late reply, I was in a spree finishing HTML Help
translations in French before the next RC release. I'll drop a message
about that a bit later. As for why the project was abandoned, honestly I
don't know. I'm still wondering it today.

> So how is Svarog386 doing and does that have translations, too?
> I vaguely remember it being a complete small FreeDOS distro?

It's a rolling release distro, which accepts proprietary freeware
programs except in the core packages. The last update was on March 19th.
And yes, it does have translations and uses a very similar mechanism to
freedoslocal.

Also, thank you for your explanations Eric.




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Re: [Freedos-devel] Translations (was: Re: Missing FDOS utilities)

[Eric Auer]

Hi Thraex,

> Er, may I ask why you don't want to normalize into a single file format?

Simply because somebody has to create and maintain the infrastructure.
Jerome seems to be motivated to do that, at the moment...

 - extract package specific translation files from packages
 - convert to uniform format
 - maintain central repository of text files in uniform format
 - incoming translation contributions as trigger
 - store updated uniform format files, track versions
 - convert to package specific format
 - compile updated package with updated sources
 - distribute updates to package maintainers, if any exist


> I guess it's not easy on the i18n and conversion side of things, but for
> translators having a gettext po file is much more efficient. No need to
> navigate a plain text file to spot missing translations or new strings

How hard that is depends a lot on how much translateable text
a specific app contains and how much the translator is used to
a specific toolchain, such as gettext po editors.

>> That would require a translation coordinator to exist and feel
>> like doing this (...)
> 
> That was exactly the goal of freedoslocal, that's why I miss it.

Which leads to the question why Mateusz abandoned it in 2016.
Either it was too much work or there were too few fresh text
translations coming in per period of time to maintain it?

> No further translation updates will be managed. I decided to give up on
> freedoslocal in favor of Svarog386, hence this website has been frozen

So how is Svarog386 doing and does that have translations, too?
I vaguely remember it being a complete small FreeDOS distro?

Regards, Eric



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Re: [Freedos-devel] Translations (was: Re: Missing FDOS utilities)

[thraex]

On 19.05.2020 02:52, Eric Auer wrote:

> Of course it would also be nice to have a central point for the
> translators: Somebody would have to collect all translatable code
> bits from the individual packages (NOT normalizing it into single
> file formats if you ask me) and put them in a repositore. When a

Er, may I ask why you don't want to normalize into a single file format?
I guess it's not easy on the i18n and conversion side of things, but for
translators having a gettext po file is much more efficient. No need to
navigate a plain text file to spot missing translations or new strings
that need to be translated, decent tools either on the translation
websites or on the desktop (poedit) and so on.

> translator submits changes, the repository maintainer could then
> distribute the changes back to the package maintainers or, if no
> maintainer is active, make fresh packages themselves for ibiblio.
> 
> That would require a translation coordinator to exist and feel
> like doing this (...)

That was exactly the goal of freedoslocal, that's why I miss it.

> PS: Who ran freedoslocal.sf.net and what happened to it?

As you can see on its front page, the culprit was Mateusz Viste :)
He stated that "As of December 2016, this project is abandoned. No
further translation updates will be managed. I decided to give up on
freedoslocal in favor of Svarog386, hence this website has been frozen,
and will likely stay so unless someone with a FreeDOS-centric background
would be willing to take over it."


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Re: [Freedos-devel] Translations (was: Re: Missing FDOS utilities)

[thraex]

On 19.05.2020 02:07, perditi...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Mon, May 18, 2020, 3:58 PM thraex  > wrote:
> 
> I understand both sides, from a translator perspective, having a single

I can only talk about the translator's perspective as I can't code
(except some broken Python stuff and... CBM BASIC :)

> So my questions:
> What is the best format for translators?
> utf8 po/pot file, code page specific catgets format (i.e. current format
> for many of the programs), some json, csv, or xml format, ???

UTF-8 po/pot file ? Yes, yes, yes! :) That's a well supported standard
which would allow to use already existing tools (poedit) and websites
(see below).

> Where should these translations be stored including how to update and
> download?
> The fd-nls GitHub page, a new GitHub page, try and revive the fd-local
> Sourceforge site, try and join another open source projects translation
> site, ???

I'd suggest a centralized website for which development (and development
tools) knowledge wouldn't be necessary, so that more people can
contribute. And like you said, it would be nice to link to that project
site from FreeDOS' "How to contribute" page
().

I personally like Weblate (). It's free software,
everyone can host their copy, there are many translators who are
familiar with it and already contributing to various projects hosted on
the official site. On the l10n side you don't need to know git or svn
and that's a plus IMHO. Just read the string and associated notes,
translate, and leave all the dirty work to the developer.

> I am willing to convert all the current programs that are part of FDOS
> GitHub site that lack upstream maintainers to do this.  That is, submit
> a source set of messages and current translations of appropriate format
> to shared site and then download and convert back for releases.

Wow, that's going to be a lot of work I guess. Thank you. Encouraging
current maintainers to join the workflow would make sense IMHO.

> Maybe freedos-local is what I want and I just didn't contribute to it's
> success.  I appreciated it.

http://freedoslocal.sf.net/ had some shortcomings: the uploads had to me
made via svn (Mateusz had kindly explained to me how to use it) the
conversion to the proper code pages from UTF-8 or the completion status
updates weren't automatic and so on. But it was a great resource. If he
reads this thread, Mateusz can certainly provide more information.


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