L10n and Docs fallback

[Asgeir Frimannsson]

Hi,

(Finally stealing some time again to work on this!)

----- "Paul W. Frields" <stickster at gmail.com> wrote:
> We have several problems currently brewing with using hosted git
> repos
> of Publican-based documents with L10n's Transifex (Tx).
> 
> 1.  Publican uses multiple POT files instead of the single POT model.
>     Transifex apparently does not currently handle multiple POT files
>     well.

Transifex can handle multiple files well, as long as the translators submit file-by-file.

> 2.  The current (obsolete but soon to be replaced) Damned Lies (DL)
>     used in L10n doesn't respond well to multiple POT files either.

I think we have two options that are feasible (~1 day work) here:

1) Use publican-generated statistics pages

This involves running a script periodically generating statistics pages similar to these for each Publican project:
http://jfearn.fedorapeople.org/Test_Report/

This option requires us to use the 'trunk' version of publican for generating statistics, as the current version does not work well with current language codes.

2) Use a single PO file for translation and let DL handle statistics.

This is slightly more work, but not rocket-science: We continue to use the ./po/ directory and have a $lang.po file for each language and a $project.pot POT file.

We then need to add perhaps 3 additional targets to the Makefile:
'potmerge' - Merges all pot files in ./pot/$doc.pot to ./po/$project.pot
'poupdate' - msgmerge's all po files in ./po/$lang.po with ./po/$project.pot
'posplit' - copies translations from ./po/$lang.po to each of ./$lang/$doc.po
   
My make-knowledge is very limited, but it might be possible to hook these targets in to the existing targets even, so that when the 'single po mode' flag is active in the Makefile, we run these when e.g. 'make update-pot' is run etc...?

This option does not require any additional changes in publican upstream. Obviously this is a short-term and stupid solution, as we don't want translators to have to manage massive PO files, but it just might work until we get a more intelligent translation system to handle these.

> 3.  There may also be some issues in Tx about support for the ISO
>     language codes used in Publican.

Jeff has been helpful and we've confirmed that Publican works with the existing language codes. 


cheers,
asgeir