[Mailman-i18n] Should we join the Translation Project?

[Barry Warsaw]

One of the biggest pains for me lately has been managing the .po file
catalogs across the HEAD and the 2.1-maint branch.  Don't get me wrong,
you guys have done a superb job of managing the i18n stuff, and you have
definitely helped make my life easier, but it seems that the po files,
the templates, and cvs just don't mix well.

Things are going to get worse as the head diverges from the 2.1-maint
branch.  This is going to start happening soon as I start to work on
Mailman 2.2.  We had talked before about moving Mailman's i18n work to
the Translation Project[1], and I think now's the perfect time to
revisit that.

I don't have any direct experience with TP, so first, I'm wondering who
out there has, and what you think about it.  My impressions from reading
the site are that, while incomplete in some ways, it provides some
useful facilities that will help separate the concerns of translators
and Mailman developers.  The major trade-off appears to be that you
translators will lose a bit of independence, since you'll be working
within the umbrella of TP language teams.  What you gain for that is
hopefully more help from other members of your language team.  I'm
pretty sure you can still concentrate your volunteer efforts on
translating Mailman though.

The alternative for going to TP would be for me to pull the messages
subdir out of the top-level directory, and manage that outside of any
CVS branches.  It would take a little bit of cvs weaving to get a source
build of Mailman from CVS, but I don't think that would be too painful. 
Note that I'm already planning on doing some CVS reorganization in
preparation for 2.2 (more on that to the -developers list later).

The other i18n change I'm planning is to adopt ZPT for the templates.  I
think we don't have to wait for MM3.0 for that, and it will have many
great advantages.  For i18n, the major advantages is that it means you
will no longer have to translate whole templates -- we can mark
translatable strings in the ZPT, and extract them to the .pot file, so
there's only one set of texts you need to translate.

Thoughts?  It seems relatively easy to register with TP, and start
working with them, and if you all are generally in favor of this, I'd
like to do it sooner rather than later.

-Barry

[1] http://www2.iro.umontreal.ca/~gnutra/po/HTML/

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