Am Son, 2001-10-07 um 16.03 schrieb 1002463421:
> Also, one important drawback of keeping all translations in one file in
> CVS, and forcing translators to edit this file, is that it gets almost
> impossible to verify the integrity of translations. As a translator and
> creator and maintainer of the translation, I feel that it is important
> that errors in my translation are my errors alone, and that I'm the only
> one responsible for them. Translation errors introduced by other people
> without permission are, well, "annoying" to say the least.
It's quite tricky to introduce any errors in XML files and easy at the
same time to fix them. CVS guarantees a certain amount of integrity
so having conflicting changes is not a problem. AND: XML can be easily
verified to be correct when there's a schema file, even remotely, and
in theory the GNOME CVS server could be teached to only allow checkin
of valid XML files.
> With a whole bunch of different people committing to the same file,
> verifying the integrity of individual translations becomes almost
> impossible.
It's not more of a problem then with several people working on
other files concurrently; that's what CVS is for. I admit that
more people on the same file are likely to have more conflicts
but that's only a theoretical problem or how often do translations
change?
> Such a file will easily become one of the most committed
> files in gimp CVS,
Okay, the most changed file is definitely the ChangeLog; who often
do you think there were conflicts? I had a couple (4 or 5) including
my more active time but Sven and Mitch can surely tell you how
often it occured to them in the last few months - just to give you
an idea how likely problems here are.
> and the danger of someone accidentally or
> intentionally messing with someone elses translation without permission
> becomes much more imminent.
Don't think so. It's about as easy to touch an .po file.
> much (and thus removing another translation) when for example cutting
Yes, mistakes happen, but also in other sources.
> and pasting, and there's always the danger of someone wanting to
> "improve" another translation, without seeing the need to ask first.
You fear competition? Well, I pissed off some evolution people while
fixing their DocBook->HTML converter once and they didn't want to have
it fixed for some reason (heck, they even wrote a contributors
killerscript because of that) so I left it alone and let them fix their
own crap and decided not to use realtime translation for gimp-help.
What's the lesson? Some people have no sense of cooperation so better
let them alone. It's the same with translations; some people don't
want contributors for their files and others don't mind when people
have something to contribute but that's not really a matter of the
fileformat.
> With a single file, the only way of verifying the integrity of my own
> translations is basically having to resort to 'cvs diff' after every
> single commit to this file in CVS, which will hardly be practical.
> With separate po files, commits to "my" file are much more rare, and I
> basically only have to ensure that the last committer was me (easily
> doable by putting in a CVS "$Id$" tag in the file) to be sure that the
> translation hasn't been changed by someone else without permission.
Ayee, reading this lines really annoys me. GIMP grew to such a beautiful
project because of cooperation. Egoism and arrogance are definitely
wrong here; if you don't want your sources to be touched then keep them
closed source. Competition is good and the fittest translation will
survive and that's not something fixed one person can decide, in doubt
people will need to discuss about it.
--
Servus,
Daniel
