Transifex.net migration may lead to loss of our copyright headers

Domingo Becker domingobecker at gmail.com
Fri Feb 25 16:56:05 UTC 2011


2011/2/25 Paul W. Frields <stickster at gmail.com>:
> On Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 07:15:00PM -0500, Manuel Eduardo Ospina Sarmiento wrote:
>> > On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 4:16 PM, Dimitris Glezos <glezos at indifex.com> wrote:
>> > > On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 1:30 PM, Ville-Pekka Vainio
>> > > <vpivaini at cs.helsinki.fi> wrote:
>> > >> It was brought to our attention by a Mageia translator on #fedora-l10n
>> > >> today, that the new version of Transifex does not leave the copyright
>> > >> headers in po files intact.
>> > >
>> > > FYI -- We are tracking the issue on this ticket (vpv already added
>> > > some useful comments on it):
>> > >
>> > >  http://trac.transifex.org/ticket/675
>> >
>> > Since that ticket is more generally about the treatment of comments, I
>> > didn't add this issue there, but for Fedora translations, are we able
>> > to ensure the copyright notice reads at a minimum, "Copyright (C)
>> > <year> Red Hat, Inc. and others"?
>>
>> Is this enough? will we lose the name of the translators that have
>> worked since 1998 and put "others" instead?
>
> Sorry, I didn't mean to imply or express whether we'd lose anything or
> not.  I simply wanted to point out the copyright notice itself should
> *at least* say that Red Hat is not the only copyright owner.  It would
> be ideal if translators were all listed.  As I understand it that
> listing would not be terribly difficult to add as a feature.


This has been discussed before [1] and [2], and it comes from 2006.

Let's talk about a long term solution for this, again.

It is useless to have comments that will be removed from the po file
by the po compiler. They will not be present in the rpm package nor in
the published document (using publican).

The copyright message may be solved with a LICENSE file in the whole
project together with the source files in the source tree.

The translator history is another different story. It is used
sometimes by translators (although mostly not used), and, if it is
well implemented, it may serve for acknowledging translators for their
work.

If I may choose here, I prefer a string like "translator-credits",
which end up in the application like they do in gpk-application or
system-config-printer, and the only translators shown are the ones for
the current selected locale.

A po file editor like poEdit doesn't show the comments at the
beginning of the po file, one would need to open the .po file with
gedit to see them. However, all po file editor have a search tool, and
a translator should only know what string to search for to see the
translation history and modify it accordingly.

With a document managed with publican, there might be a string like
that too, in a section like "<para>translator-credits</para>" in the
xml file for a chapter, just like the Colophon chapter/section Paul
once proposed [3]. I saw it is possible to implement. I will ask
Guillermo Gomez (gomix) to implement it in the Software Management
Guide, just for the proof of concept.

So, the copyright message in a comment in a source file can be solved
with a LICENSE file in the source tree, the same way it is done with
some Fedora packages where the license is missing in the source code.

The translator history clearly needs a solution outside Tx. It only
needs developers and doc-writers care for the L10N people who will
contribute translating their work.

[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-April/msg00174.html

[2] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue174#Document_Colophon

[3] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2008-March/msg00132.html

kind regards

Domingo Becker (es)


More information about the trans mailing list