On Wed, Mar 05, 2003 at 01:02:13PM +0100, Nikola Djurovic wrote:

We are thinking to use mailman and to develop it for Serbian Language. Would you be so kind and post some of your experience and a guidelines how we can start doing it, what tehnical knowledge-base we need to have, for us to be positive on being accepted for that work.

Hi Nikola, I'll answer here on the list because I think this thread is worth being published on the list archive. You can start without much technical knowledge, but if you want to keep your translation up-to-date (while the development branch evolves into the next stable release) you'd better learn how to use cvs and diff. Here is my recipe. Basically, you'll start by copying templates/en/* to your sandbox dir and then translating each file. Keep in mind that %(foo)s is a variable reference (much like %s in C) and must be left untouched. Also, you must be able to recognize a markup tag (eg, <foo>) because they must be left untouched too, and you should know how to escape non-ASCII characters, e.g. "è" -> "è", but only in html files. Remember that if you need a literal % sign, it must be doubled: %% Next, you copy messages/mailman.pot, renaming it to serbian.po. You can open this file with kbabel (a tool included in KDE SDK) and translate each string (original on the higher half of the window, your translation on the bottom half). If you are a masochist, you can even use emacs PO mode ;) Keep attention to the same markers and escaping as above, with the added complexity that here it's harder to say when a string is html (e.g. used for web UI) or pure text (e.g used for email interface) Then you try to compile you .po file: msgfmt -v -o serbian.mo serbian.po No error messages should appear. Next, copy your files on an installed mailman tree, and run bin/transcheck XX where XX is your coutry code. No warning should appear (but maybe some warning is ok, if you really know what you're doing). Now, try to run your translation (add an "add_language" line to Mailman/Defaults.py) and check the many scattered pieces blend together well. Sometimes you'll need some adjustment. When you're satistied, pack up a tar.gz with the following structure: messages/XX/LC_MESSAGES/mailman.po messages/XX/LC_MESSAGES/mailman.mo templates/XX/admindbdetails.html templates/XX/admindbpreamble.html . . templates/XX/userpass.txt templates/XX/verify.txt (XX is your country code) and send it to Barry Warsaw. By that time, your translation could be somewhat obsolete, because templates and mailman.pot could have been evolved meanwhile. Don't panic. You'll need to check diffs to find what changed and how, so that you can easily update your files. Save everything everytime, you'll need it. Bye -- Simone Piunno -- http://members.ferrara.linux.it/pioppo .------- Adde parvum parvo magnus acervus erit -------. Ferrara Linux Users Group - http://www.ferrara.linux.it Deep Space 6, IPv6 on Linux - http://www.deepspace6.net GNU Mailman, Mailing List Manager - http://www.list.org `-------------------------------------------------------'