Locale isn't switched to UK English

[humdinger]

This is hrev50953.

The en_gb.catalog for e.g. Appearance is included in the image and holds the Colors->Colours translation, but selecting "English (United Kingdom)" in the Locale prefs doesn't have an effect: The tab in Appearance still says "Colors".

Looking at the file names of the catalogs, it's "pt_BR.catalog" and "zh_Hans.catalog", but "en_ca.catalog" and "en_gb.catalog". I only checked the switch to Chinese, which is working, but is it possible that it's a naming issue?

[pulkomandy]

Yes, the country should be uppercase (en_GB). Also, I checked from Pootle, and eg. the BootManager one seems to be missing. The one from Appearance is from the old Haiku Translation Assistant (hrev37566 is the last change to it), which I think explains the wrong name.

So:

• All en_gb and en_ca catalogs should be deleted
• Export from pootle should be enabled for en_CA and en_GB

And we should review all catalogs to make sure there aren't other languages in the same situation.

[humdinger]

Assigning to waddlesplash, in the hope he knows enough about pootle's guts...

Also missing are catalogs for: ca - Catalan da - Danish el - Greek hi - Hindi nb - Norwegian Bokmål pa - Punjabi

[waddlesplash]

Assigning to waddlesplash, in the hope he knows enough about pootle's guts...

Nope, I know literally nothing about Pootle's guts. It's an utter nightmare in there.

The one from Appearance is from the old Haiku Translation Assistant

Speaking of HTA -- I don't know much about it, and can't seem to find anything out -- why did we switch off of it and on to Pootle? Maybe HTA was bad, but it seems Pootle is pretty horrible, too. Only one person seems to know how to manage it (nielx) which is a bad situation; it has an internal format which is wildly different from our external one(s), it breaks rather regularly in arcane ways that need to be fixed (by said one person who understands it), etc. Maybe using a custom web app would be better at this point?

[pulkomandy]

HTA was a custom app, even more crashy and bug prone, and the UI was not as good. No one will miss it and I don't think we should go back to a custom solution. It was based on Drupal in its second incarnation, IIRC the first one was plain php (relevant ML archives from 2010: ​http://www.freelists.org/post/haiku/Haiku-Translation-Assistant-ready-for-action)

Updating Pootle to a newer one and cleaning up the hacks sounds ok. Moving to some other standard tool is fine too. If it uses a different format, it is rather easy to convert and adjust our tools to match, as long as the format allows what we need: context, comment, original text, and translated text ; with both the context and comment being part of the "key" for a given translation. Any format that fits this need can be converted into our native catalogs rather easily.

For completeness, I should also mention that at hg.haiku-os.org there is a WIP trac plugin for system translation. I think it is abusing Trac well beyond what it is meant to do, so, please forget about it :).

[humdinger]

Looks like this might be another instance of our starving-for-admins situation... I can imagine, sticking with pootle would be the easiest and most sensible option. In any case, don't forget that any potential new tool should have "translation memory" and different levels of user permissions (everyone can suggest a translation, only few 'known' users can approve them) like pootle already has.

[pulkomandy]

And many other features, such as suggesting similar translations in other parts of the system, highlighting typography errors, listing the credits for translations (which we then use to populate AboutSystem credits), etc.

Did Pootle break this often? As far as I remember it has been working quite reliably for the past years. The import/export from the buildbots and to the git tree is another problem, and I don't mind that part being reworked.

[nielx]

There only seems to be an en_gb for Appearance, not for any other applet. I cannot find any other in the tree. This has been fixed in hrev50978

Also, the en_GB was not properly exported (it was accidentally named as en_UK in the ​finish_import script). Any (updated) translations should be exported next week.

Finally a note on which languages are exported. At the time it was discussed that only languages that reach a certain level of completeness should be exported to the repository, as not to include too many half-baked translations. The languages that were complete enough, were hardcoded in the finish_import script. I suggest we have this discussion again on the mailing list.

[pulkomandy]

The "mostly complete" criterion for which languages to include is fine, but we should keep the list up to date. The locale-specific languages such as en_UK and pt_BR are an exception because they can fallback to the parent language, so in some sense they are always "complete" and not all strings need to be adjusted.