-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hi Clytie, This was extremely helpful, thanks! I've captured this on the wiki: http://wiki.list.org/display/DEV/Pootle+primer Just a couple of comments.
DOWNLOADING
The Pootle docs (Docs and Help link, or [3]) contain everything you need to know about Pootle, so please read them. However, I'll go on with a summary here.
You can download your translation file(s) at any time from your Pootle project directory. Look for the "Zip Archive" link at the top of the page, to download a whole directory of files, or for the "PO format" link next to each file (when you've clicked on Show Editing Functions), to download a single file. As you can see, you can download your file in different formats.
Ah, downloading was buried on the Show Editing Functions page. I knew I had to be missing it!
Barry, if you want to download all the PO files at once, you're better off downloading them from bzr. Pootle splits the files into language-projects.
When you say "download from bzr", I'm not sure what you mean. Does Pootle's bzr integration actually publish its own branches? If so, that would be very cool! Ideally, I'd like for the translators to just do their thing, without regard to Mailman's release cycle. (In practice though, we should give them a heads up of course.) When we're ready to release we Push A Button to grab all the current translations and package them up into whatever form we need. We can probably automate it all, screen scraping if we have to (though that sucks), but if we had access to those files through bzr, that would rock. If possible, I'm sure we could set up a fake user on Launchpad for Pootle to push branches to, say once per day. That would also be very cool because then we wouldn't have to fear for Cristobal's machine crashing.
UPLOADING
If you have upload rights, each directory will include a file selection field and button in the top right-hand corner of the page. You can choose to Merge or Overwrite files. Unless your Pootle server is overloaded, you should use Merge, to avoid overwriting changes that have occurred since you downloaded your file. The changes are processed immediately: you can start editing that merged file as soon as you have uploaded it.
Barry, I strongly suggest we keep the most current files on Pootle (Mailman 3.0?), even for testing. We can upload all the different branches, as well, but our translation effort is best spent working on the current files.
Agreed. I really want to split the translations out of the main tree anyway, so I'm happy if they live on the Pootle server, or even better, on Launchpad. As part of our release process, we can grab and combine everything.
BACKUP
Pootle is just a part of your workflow: please backup your work! Although Pootle does backup its day's work, it doesn't backup every single string as soon as you enter it. This would take up too much of its resources. So it's always wise to download your file or directory when you finish your editing session. That way, you have a local copy of your changes. You can take that away, and edit it offline, then merge it back up to Pootle again, later.
Does Pootle back the files up off-site? See the push-to-Launchpad idea.
Firstly, please read the introductory docs and try out the interface. If you have further questions, you're welcome to ask them here.
One other thing I think we need to be careful of. I've been sadly too lax about this in the past, but we can do better now. Let's make sure that any translator we give permission to has signed the necessary papers with the FSF. http://translationproject.org/html/whydisclaim.html If a translator has already disclaimed their translations, they'll be listed on this page: http://translationproject.org/html/authors.html I'll urge all Mailman translators to go ahead and send the disclaimer form now. Cheers, - -Barry -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (Darwin) iEYEARECAAYFAkhs1RwACgkQ2YZpQepbvXHhCgCcDHWBte+JH60LPsp/TadrdR2/ mE8AoLj5aOPctLnYi3Nxsu9so/KUbNC1 =XM5I -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----