Translation

My Free Software Activities in August 2014

September 2, 2014 by Raphaël Hertzog

This is my monthly summary of my free software related activities. If you’re among the people who made a donation to support my work (65.55 €, thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it’s just an interesting status update on my various projects.

Distro Tracker

Even though I was officially in vacation during 3 of the 4 weeks of August, I spent many nights working on Distro Tracker. I’m pleased to have managed to bring back Python 3 compatibility over all the (tested) code base. The full test suite now passes with Python 3.4 and Django 1.6 (or 1.7).

From now on, I’ll run “tox” on all code submitted to make sure that we won’t regress on this point. tox also runs flake8 for me so that I can easily detect when the submitted code doesn’t respect the PEP8 coding style. It also catches other interesting mistakes (like unused variable or too complex functions).

Getting the code to pass flake8 was also a major effort, it resulted in a huge commit (89 files changed, 1763 insertions, 1176 deletions).

Thanks to the extensive test suite, all those refactoring only resulted in two regressions that I fixed rather quickly.

Some statistics: 51 commits over the last month, 41 by me, 3 by Andrew Starr-Bochicchio, 3 by Christophe Siraut, 3 by Joseph Herlant and 1 by Simon Kainz. Thanks to all of them! Their contributions ported some features that were already available on the old PTS. The new PTS is now warning of upcoming auto-removals, is displaying problems with uptream URLs, includes a short package description in the page title, and provides a link to screenshots (if they exist on screenshots.debian.net).

We still have plenty of bugs to handle, so you can help too: check out https://tracker.debian.org/docs/contributing.html. I always leave easy bugs for others to handle, so grab one and get started! I’ll review your patch with pleasure. 🙂

Tryton

After my last batch of contributions to Tryton’s French Chart of Accounts (#4108, #4109, #4110, #4111) Cédric Krier granted me commit rights to the account_fr mercurial module.

Debconf 14

I wasn’t able to attend this year but thanks to awesome work of the video team, I watched some videos (and I still have a bunch that I want to see). Some of them were put online the day after they had been recorded. Really amazing work!

Django 1.7

After the initial bug reports, I got some feedback of maintainers who feared that it would be difficult to get their packages working with Django 1.7. I helped them as best as I can by providing some patches (for horizon, for django-restricted-resource, for django-testscenarios).

Since I expected many maintainers to be not very pro-active, I rebuilt all packages with Django 1.7 to detect at least those that would fail to build. I tagged as confirmed all the corresponding bug reports.

Looking at https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=python-django@packages.debian.org;tag=django17, one can see that some progress has been made with 25 packages fixed. Still there are at least 25 others that are still problematic in sid and 35 that have not been investigated at all (except for the automatic rebuild that passed). Again your help is more than welcome!

It’s easy to install python-django 1.7 from experimental and they try to use/rebuild the packages from the above list.

Dpkg translation

With the freeze approaching, I wanted to ensure that dpkg was fully translated in French. I thus pinged debian-l10n-french@lists.debian.org and merged some translations that were done by volunteers. Unfortunately it looks like nobody really stepped up to maintain it in the long run… so I did myself the required update when dpkg 1.17.12 got uploaded.

Is there anyone willing to manage dpkg’s French translation? With the latest changes in 1.17.13, we have again a few untranslated strings:
$ for i in $(find . -name fr.po); do echo $i; msgfmt -c -o /dev/null --statistics $i; done ./po/fr.po 1083 translated messages, 4 fuzzy translations, 1 untranslated message. ./dselect/po/fr.po 268 translated messages, 3 fuzzy translations. ./scripts/po/fr.po 545 translated messages. ./man/po/fr.po 2277 translated messages, 8 fuzzy translations, 3 untranslated messages.

Misc stuff

I made an xsane QA upload (it’s currently orphaned) to drop the (build-)dependency on liblcms1 and avoid getting it removed from Debian testing (see #745524). For the record, how-can-i-help warned me of this after one dist-upgrade.

With the Django 1.7 work and the need to open up an experimental branch, I decided to switch python-django’s packaging to git even though the current team policy is to use subversion. This triggered (once more) the discussion about a possible switch to git and I was pleased to see more enthusiasm this time around. Barry Warsaw tested a few workflows, shared his feeling and pushed toward a live discussion of the switch during Debconf. It looks like it might happen for good this time. I contributed my share in the discussions on the mailing list.

Thanks

See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

Kickstart the Arabic Translation of the Debian Handbook

March 17, 2014 by Raphaël Hertzog

I just wanted to highlight that Muhammad Saied, a volunteer translator of the Debian Administrator’s Handbook, is currently running a crowdfunding campaign with Mohamed Amine so that they can complete the Arabic translation that they started.

There’s only 6 days left to collect the last $2500… click here to help spread Debian to the Arabic world.

Contributing to the translation of Debian

January 31, 2012 by Raphaël Hertzog

If you’re not into packaging and if you asked how you could help Debian, someone probably suggested that you help to translate it.

It’s true that translating Debian is essential if we want to make Debian available to everybody on the world. There are many persons who are stuck as soon as they get a message in English, so it’s important to aim for 100% coverage in terms of localization.

Some vocabulary: localization vs internationalization

Internationalization (i18n) is the work that makes it possible to translate messages in a given application.

Localization (l10n) is the work of translating messages of said application. So as a translator, you’ll be doing “localization” but some knowledge of “internationalization” is still useful… because it will define how you’re supposed to provide the translations. We’ll come back to that later.

Join your localization team

Usually the translation work is shared among multiple translators within a localization team. Check out the Debian International page on www.debian.org to find out instructions for translators for each language.

Many teams have a debian-l10n-*@lists.debian.org mailing list used for coordination, feel free to ask questions on those lists when you start (but make sure that you have read the relevant documentation before).

Each team has its own workflow, so observe for a while to get used to what’s happening before asking your first questions.

What is there to translate?

The translation of most of the software provided by Debian is not handled by Debian. The Debian translation teams “only” handle the translation of:

the software that are specific to Debian (debian-installer, dpkg, APT, etc.) (*);
the Debconf prompts in all Debian packages (*);
the Debian documentation (*);
the Debian website;
the Debian wiki;
the descriptions of packages.

Now before contributing to your first translation, I have to come back to internationalization to teach you a few things. In the above list, the projects marked with “(*)” do use PO files for their translation and the next sections will explain you how to work with those files.

Introduction to Gettext

The free software community has mostly standardized on a single internationalization infrastructure known as Gettext. With this tool, you’re provided a “POT file” which contains all the translatable strings. It looks like this:

# SOME DESCRIPTIVE TITLE.
# Copyright (C) YEAR Software in the Public Interest, Inc.
# This file is distributed under the same license as the PACKAGE package.
# FIRST AUTHOR , YEAR.
#
#, fuzzy
msgid ""
msgstr ""
"Project-Id-Version: dpkg 1.16.1\n"
"Report-Msgid-Bugs-To: debian-dpkg@lists.debian.org\n"
"POT-Creation-Date: 2011-09-23 03:37+0200\n"
"PO-Revision-Date: YEAR-MO-DA HO:MI+ZONE\n"
"Last-Translator: FULL NAME \n"
"Language-Team: LANGUAGE \n"
"Language: \n"
"MIME-Version: 1.0\n"
"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8\n"
"Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n"
"Plural-Forms: nplurals=INTEGER; plural=EXPRESSION;\n"

#: lib/dpkg/ar.c:66
#, c-format
msgid "invalid character '%c' in archive '%.250s' member '%.16s' size"
msgstr ""

#: lib/dpkg/ar.c:81 lib/dpkg/ar.c:97 lib/dpkg/ar.c:108 lib/dpkg/ar.c:112
#: lib/dpkg/ar.c:134 utils/update-alternatives.c:1154
#, c-format
msgid "unable to write file '%s'"
msgstr ""

[…]

The lines starting with “#:” are comments that indicate the source files where the (English) string is used. This can be useful if you want check the source to have more information about how the string is used.

The lines starting with “#,” contain flags that can be important. If the “fuzzy” flag is set, the translated string is not used because it must be updated (or at least verified) since the original string evolved. The “c-format” flags indicates that the string must be a C format string, this has some implications in what’s allowed in the string (in particular when it embeds conversion specifier for arguments submitted to printf-like functions).

Another thing to note is that the translation of the empty string is used to store some meta-information about the translation itself.

Contributing a translation as a PO file

When you start a new translation, you copy that POT file to create a “PO file” for your own language (eg. fr.po for the French language). You replace some template values (identified with the upper case words in the POT file) and you replace all the empty strings on “msgstr” lines with the translation of the string that appears in the previous “msgid” line.

The result could be something like this:

# translation of fr.po to French
# Messages français pour dpkg (Linux-GNU Debian).
msgid ""
msgstr ""
"Project-Id-Version: fr\n"
"Report-Msgid-Bugs-To: debian-dpkg@lists.debian.org\n"
"POT-Creation-Date: 2011-09-23 03:37+0200\n"
"PO-Revision-Date: 2012-01-16 07:57+0100\n"
"Last-Translator: Christian Perrier \n"
"Language-Team: French \n"
"Language: fr\n"
"MIME-Version: 1.0\n"
"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8\n"
"Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n"
"Plural-Forms: Plural-Forms: nplurals=2; plural=n>1;\n"
"X-Generator: Lokalize 1.2\n"

#: lib/dpkg/ar.c:66
#, c-format
msgid "invalid character '%c' in archive '%.250s' member '%.16s' size"
msgstr "caractère invalide « %1$c » dans la taille du membre « %3$.16s » de l'archive « %2$.250s »"

#: lib/dpkg/ar.c:81 lib/dpkg/ar.c:97 lib/dpkg/ar.c:108 lib/dpkg/ar.c:112
#: lib/dpkg/ar.c:134 utils/update-alternatives.c:1154
#, c-format
msgid "unable to write file '%s'"
msgstr "impossible d'écrire le fichier « %s »"

[…]

If there’s already a “PO file” for your language, there might still work to do: there might be strings that have not yet been translated and there might be “fuzzy” strings which have to be updated — strings which were already translated but where the original string has been modified.

There are software that can assist you to edit PO files: poedit, virtaal, lokalize, gtranslator. There are also special extensions for vim (packaged in vim-scripts) and for Emacs.

Submit the translation for inclusion

Once you have a complete PO file, you should submit it for inclusion. Sometimes you will have been granted commit rights to the source code repository so that you can include your translation by yourself. In the other cases, you should submit your translation with a bug report tagged “l10n” and someone else will include your work in the next release.

Depending on the team, the workflow might require a review before the submission. In that case, you usually have to send a call for review on the coordination mailing list.

Go ahead!

Hopefully those explanations will be enough to get you started. There are many other things to learn¹ but it’s good to learn while practicing…

¹ For example, can you find out why the French translation above changed “%c” in “%1$c”?

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Do You Want a Free Debian Book? Read on.

July 28, 2010 by Raphaël Hertzog

Cover of my French Debian Book While I have made good progress on many of my Debian goals for this year, it’s not the case for the goal number #1: translating my Debian book into English. The picture on the left is the cover of the current French version based on Debian Lenny (450 pages). But the translation would be based on the next edition that we’re currently preparing and it’s based on Debian Squeeze of course! We have already translated the table of contents so that you can get an idea of what’s in the book. Note that many parts of the book apply to Ubuntu as well.

It’s quite difficult for Roland and me to allocate several months of our life to such a huge task without any income in that period and without knowing if our book will sell enough to cover for the time invested. For those reasons, we’re considering using a service like kickstarter.com or ulule.com or yooook.net to get this project funded.

If you don’t know those services, they allow you to present your project and to collect pledges so that you can safely complete your project. The money pledged is distributed only if the total amount pledged exceeds the minimal funding level (set by the project creator). Furthermore you can select nice rewards depending on the amount of money pledged.

To make things even more exciting we are ready to publish the book under a DFSG-compatible license at the sole condition that we reach 25 000€ of donations. That might look like a lot but in fact it’s only 5€ donated by 5000 persons and then everybody benefits! And for the authors, you have to remove ~10% of fees taken by the funding service (including card processing fees), 16.4% VAT, 9% social taxes and if you consider that the project represents a minimum of 6 months of work, that ends up to at most 2850 €/month. We believe this to be reasonable.

The next step for us is to pick the service to use and setup the fundraising. We need your input. Please answer a few questions by filling this form.

In all cases, we will have those rewards and probably more:

the book in digital format (PDF, HTML, ePub) (between 5€ and 10€, price not fixed yet)
the book as paperback (between 35€ and 50€, price not fixed yet)
the paperback book with a dedication by (one of) the authors

A few considerations about the various services: Kickstarter.com is a great service but it’s restricted to US-residents so it’s complicated for us to use that service since we’re French (and live in France) and the supporters need to have an Amazon (payments) account. Ulule.com is open to anyone for project creation but uses a paypal API to deal with the pledge mechanism and thus imposes that all supporters have a paypal account. Is that requirement likely to scare you away? Yooook.net is specialized in liberation fundraising but the interface is not very polished, they don’t offer (many) social features nor do they give a public listing of the projects hosted.

The choice is difficult and thus we’re seeking your feedback to make the right one, take a few minutes and answer our questions: click here to go to the form.

Thank you for your help and please spread the word so that we get enough answers to have meaningful results.

Update: it has been brought to my attention that kickstarter requires an Amazon (payments) account. I fixed my article and the form to document this.

I have also been asked what license we’re going to use. It’s likely to be dual-licensed GPL2+ / CC-BY-SA 3.0.

Update: The crowfunding campaign is now running on Ulule. Click here to see its project page.