[Localization] Heads up about Glucose L10n

[Chris Leonard]

[cc'd to sugar-devel. just in case I got any of this really, really wrong]

Dear Localizers,

As you may know, much of the focus in this development cycle of Sugar
(0.95 > 0.96) is on things that happen "under the hood'.  At this
point in time, Glucose has only diverged from Glucose 0.94 by about 90
words.  There are a number of elements involved in the current
re-factoring work.  There are changes being made to graphics handling
to use Cairo, which is generally a good thing for localizers, but
doesn't have a lot of impact on our L10n process.  There is a process
of removing a dependency on an older technology called hippo-canvas,
which again doesn't impact L10n to any great extent.

The main change that will impact our localization process is the
re-factoring of Glucose to be able to support both gtk2+ and gtk3+.
Blocks of source code are being shuffled around to make it easier for
Sugar to support both gtk2+ and gtk3+ in the same build.  Of course,
this means that it is possible that strings may move around from one
PO file to another within Glucose.  There has been some discussion
about whether or not the 5 word suagr-base.po may disappear entirely
into one of the other Glucose PO files, but it is not certain at the
moment, and in any event that will not have a huge impact on
localisers one way or the other.

In the near future, it is very likely that the 78 word
sugar-toolkit.po file will be more or less duplicated.  One
sugar-toolkit,po to support gtk2+ and another (with a slightly
different name) to support gtk3+.  At first they will probably start
with exactly the same strings, so we will do what we can to just copy
over completed strings from one to the other on the backend.  This
does mean we will have a small amount of "duplicate-work" to maintain
the two PO files, but as it is possible that they may diverge in their
strings, this minimal amount of redundancy is just going to be
necessary.  At only 78 words or so, this is just not a big deal given
how important the change from gtk2+ to gtk3+ is in the source code and
the importance of supporting both interfaces during the transition
phase.

I would encourage localizers working towards a complete set of strings
to work on the Glucose 0.94 project as this version is frozen and it
is the Sugar 0.94 version that will be used in most distribution
channels that people care about (OLPC builds, Dextrose builds, Linus
distro packages, TOAST/SOAS builds, etc.).  More than 95% of the
strings will be easily copied over exactly to the Glucose project, so
if you are going to focus on one, focus on Glucose 0.94 for now.

As these changes land in the source code repository and then make
their way into the Glucose project, further announcements will be made
to the L10n list, but I just wanted you all to have some idea of what
might be happening as we move forward and the reasons behind the
justification for carrying redundant toolkit PO file strings.

Warmest Regards,

cjl
Sugar Labs Translation Team Coordinator