Hi everyone :) I have been catching up with my projects, a bit, and was told that Mailman has decided to go with Rosetta (Launchpad) rather than their Pootle install. (I hope my absence as a Pootle tester and advocate over the past few months didn't have anything to do with that. If so, I apologize.)
The good news is that Rosetta finally went open source (thanks to my lobbying, I'm told, but that was probably only a minor factor), and Rosetta has also finally implemented some access and quality controls. They (or Canonical) also seem good at headhunting: they employed the Mailman lead developer even before my absence, and I am told they now have Danilo Segan working on Rosetta. Danilo is one of the most experienced and respected i18n people in free software, and where he goes, GNOME won't be far behind. The question is: are Pootle and Rosetta serving the same audience? If so, how can we be more useful to that audience, now Rosetta has caught up with some of our key advantages? It occurred to me in the night watches that Rosetta's main advantage in this situation is its integration with projects. That's certainly what I have heard, and continue to hear on my project lists. If you're running a project on Launchpad, and you need translations, you don't need to install anything, create any procedures or setup anything much. Rosetta is integrated in Launchpad. Your translation teams can devolve from your development team. I still think the capability to install anywhere is important to Pootle, but I think we need to lower the barrier there (cf. the regular appearance on this list of frustrated and confused posts from people trying to install Pootle). We need to provide installers, and work with the package-management systems. I also suggest for your discussion the possibility of integrating Pootle with another project-development platform, e.g. SourceForge or GForge. The Translate project is already (still?) based at SourceForge. The SF people have been rabbitting on for months now about extended infrastructure and providing more services for projects. They could also provide a Pootle. It would be integrated with SF, available just as the source-control repos and other services are. It would integrate with their source-control system and wiki. It would have the resources to host large numbers of projects (thus fulfilling another need we have seen expressed regularly on this list). It would take a lot of the headaches out of i18n for projects. I myself translate for several SF projects, including Fontforge, Inkscape and Mailman. I think Mailman, as an SF project, might well have decided in favour of Pootle if it had been available as part of the SF infrastructure. Inkscape and Fontforge AFAIK are still struggling without a translation interface. I believe they would both be interested in having a Pootle available. And there are so many projects running on SF, even if only 1% chose to use Pootle, it would be a success. Gforge is another possibility: it hosts po4a (GPL), which has a number of doc format PO conversion filters which we could combine with Pootle (there or elsewhere). For those who prefer to roll their own, we need to take some of the pain out of trying to start and run your own Pootle, by providing installers and timely and effective package-management versions. For the rest, we can take virtually all of the pain out of localization by providing an integrated Pootle. What do you think? from Clytie Vietnamese Free Software Translation Team ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Come build with us! The BlackBerry® Developer Conference in SF, CA is the only developer event you need to attend this year. Jumpstart your developing skills, take BlackBerry mobile applications to market and stay ahead of the curve. Join us from November 9-12, 2009. Register now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/devconf _______________________________________________ Translate-pootle mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/translate-pootle
