Important opportunity for a Sugarization project

[Chris Leonard]

Dear Sugar and Virtaal Developers,

It would be really wonderful if an activity developer would consider
taking on the task of Sugarizing the Virtaal local PO edittng tool.

http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/virtaal/index

It might make a nice hackfest project.  While it is easy enough to
install Virtaal on the Gnome side of the dual boot OLPC images (sudo
yum install virtaal), this currently requires that the XO be unlocked
with a developer's key.  The Virtaal developers are the same people
that give us Pootle, and they are a great group and have been very
helpful to Sugar / OLPC L10n efforts.  While I can't promise, I
suspect that it might be possible to entice one or more of them to
collaborate on this effort.

Having a Sugarized Virtaal activity would allow it's use on SOAS and
XO's not using a dual-boot image.  The presence of such an activity is
truly complementary to the show source improvements that have been
made and would allow for small deployments (without great bandwidth)
to truly bootstrap themselves into a fully localized UI.  We've
already heard reports of kids producing their own bilingual
dictionaries on XO laptops, why not allow them to localize their own
software.

I think this would be a huge win for Sugar as a whole (and a boost for
Virtaal as well) and I hope that someone would consider taking on this
project that has a potentially huge impact on the Sugar user
experience.  This is genuinely about making it possible to allow full
appropriation of our tools for local purposes.  I know that there are
other possible candidates for local PO editors, but I believe that
Virtaal has a number of advantages over many of the other possible
choices.

Warmest Regards,

cjl
volunteer Sugar Labs / OLPC / eToys Poolte admin