[Libreoffice] l10n based on PO files

[Andras Timar]

Hi Christian,

2011/3/14 Christian Lohmaier <lohmaier+libreoffice at googlemail.com>:
> Hi Andras, *,
>
> On Mon, Mar 14, 2011 at 2:26 PM, Andras Timar <timar74 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>> Exactly. :) Most translators use po files to translate LibreOffice and
>> storing those po files in git has more advantages.
>> * Many small files vs. one big file / language -> smaller changesets in git
>> * English - translated string pairs -> translations can be always in
>> sync with English
>
> This is a huge contradiction in itself, isn't it? Having the english
> string in each and every file also means that you have to update
> *every* file when a string changes, thus your "small changesets" don't

I don't understand what you mean. When a string changes for example in
svx/source/dialog/sdstring.src, then only the small
svx/source/dialog.po will be changed not the whole SDF file.

> provide any benefit at all. (not to mention how will be responsible
> for updating all the files once an English string changes?)

The proposed l10n workflow is the following. I provide en-US.sdf and
pot files regularly (let say bi-weekly). en-US.sdf and pot files can
be generated with the makefile.mk of the 'translations' module. I also
update Pootle. Before release, I get translations from Pootle (or from
external sources) and commit them to git. I'll normalize po files
before commit so changes will be minimal and diffs will be meaningful.
E.g. I'm not interested in changes of timestamps in po header and
changes caused by different word wrap. We will see only the changes in
strings. Most of the files will not change at all between two
releases.

>
> (Besides I doubt there is any benefit wrt changesets when using many
> small files compared to one big file)

Let's imagine I change 1 line in all sdf files (~13 MB each), because
I change Oracle to The Document Foundation or whatever. It means that
git will add 104 times 13 Megabytes compressed. That's the size of the
changeset. It can be ~100 MB. Have you tried to see a log or a diff at
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/l10n/? It does not work,
because session is timed out before git provides the result. git is
bad at handling large files.

Best regards,
Andras