[Proposal] .xot bundles, for translations

[Sayamindu Dasgupta]

Hello,
One of the things in my TODO for 9.1 is to have a better mechanism for
language packs[1] in the XO. The primary goal of language packs is to
decouple the process of translations from the process of OS release as
much as possible, since as our software gets larger and more
complicated, it will become more and more difficult for translators to
keep up with the pace of development.
Our current language pack mechanism handles the decoupling part, but
two of its significant shortcomings include

a) Overwriting of existing translation files (it may overwrite the
original .mo file in certain cases)
b) Difficulty for deployments (deployments have to manual start each
XO, and run the pack installer script from a console)
c) No auto update mechanism

I have been thinking of having a separate place in the filesystem for
_new_ translations, and using RPM to manage the installation and
upgradation of the new translations.
However, Scott suggested in a recent email conversation that deploying
new translations through a bundle like format (used for activities and
content right now) may make more sense as users themselves can use the
Sugar control panel to download updated translations (as currently
done with activities). I think this may be a better option than RPMs
as

a) It makes the new translations user modifiable (we can have a
translate activity later on which would let users modify the
translations)
b) It would be pretty trivial to add support for a new .xot format in
the customization key mechanism (just unzip them in /home/olpc)

However, this would need XO specific changes in glibc, python, etoys
and scratch (I think). I already have patches for glibc and python
(based on patches from Ubuntu, which already uses a similar system,
where they generate language packs out of their launchpad/rosetta
based translations)

Am I missing something out here ? If there are no problems with this
proposal, I would like to start testing such a system in Joyride (with
at least glibc and python patched) by the end of the month.

Thanks,
Sayamindu


[1]http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Localization/LanguagePacks
-- 
Sayamindu Dasgupta
[http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings]