[pve-devel] Can Proxmox use Weblate? (Was: Re: [PATCH i18n 1/1] Currently translated at 98.2% (1800 of 1832 strings))

[Thomas Lamprecht]

On 27/08/2021 13:39, Claudio Ferreira wrote:
> Em qui., 26 de ago. de 2021 às 10:25, Thomas Lamprecht <t.lamprecht at proxmox.com> escreveu:
>> Much thanks for your contribution here, appreciated!
>>
> 
> You are welcome.
> 
> Was a work of one week with a good tool. Maybe you can think a bit to use a
> better tool with integration. With Weblate I got some contributions for
> other languages, including Norwegian, by another debian developer. Really
> is easy to receive contributions in this tool.
> 

I am a bit wary of such tool, as they are centralized and often just not as
simple as a plain text editor or POEdit, but that aside, for German or Italian
I actually like to ensure that the translation fits and that's not always true
for Proxmox VE if one is taking a, possible too generic, translation from a
big translation pool.

> There, when you open a new project, you can set a lot of things, mainly the
> legal/licence/contribution questions, removing "problems" like string
> extraction, tools installation, etc. Do you use only the browser and dot.
> It is more easy that to use PoEdit.

That depends on preference, I'm very used to VIM and I'm nowhere as fast as
there, also learning the knacks of yet another web-tool, even if easy seems
a bit weird to me - especially as this is just editing text; but to each
their own.

> 
> In other hand, the work to update the source files and extract new
> templates can stay with you. In Weblate, we pull all changes (from source)
> and update all locale files (lang-contry.po files) automatically. At final,
> Weblate generate a pool request in git and you need only to accept the
> merge.
> 
> Yesterday, Matomo (old Piwik) announced its migration from Transifex to
> Weblate, and they have a similar business model like Proxmox. Maybe, with
> Proxmox in more languages can expand your market share in this segment.
> 

While I can see some benefits of using a central translation site, i.e., mostly
the bigger exposure that comes with it, I (and here I'm speaking a bit with my
PVE project lead hat on) like to keep it simple and flexible in terms of tool
choice. Currently one can pull the .po files either by git but also through
browser or basically any HTTP client. Editing then can be done with ones
favorite editor for that task, be it POEdit, or just one of vim/emacs/vs code/...
that's what I like; no hard dependency on anything and simple/flexible.

The extraction and update tools are not necessary for most translator, as we
frequently commit an update of the extracted PO files anyway.

I'm also very flexible in how to take a translation, some frequent translators
of Chinese (both, Traditional and Simplified) just send me the whole updated
PO file and I check it, look over the changes to ensure no format mistake or
the like happened and commit that for them, works quite good in general from
my experience.

Thanks for your thoughts about that topic, I'll certainly try to take a closer
look at weblate. But, if we add it to our workflow I'd like to only include it
as optional way, keeping the extremely simple "download PO edit with any text
editor" way.

cheers,
Thomas