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

["Martin v. Löwis"]

Barry Warsaw wrote:

> Good, then we could implement a grace period for getting disclaimers
> in.  How easy is it to import our existing .po files?

Importing the PO files can be done very quickly - e.g. submitting
the URL of a distribution file to translation at iro.umontreal.ca would be 
sufficient.

However, the mailman challenge might be incorporation of the HTML
templates. For this, we have no precedence, yet. I would suggest to use
similar procedures: email submission of new revisions of HTML template
files by the  translators; likewise email distribution of new versions
of the  English "master" documents to translators.

In PO files, both the Project-Id-Version and the POT-Creation-Date are
used by the TP robot to establish consistency, allowing to determine
whether a certain translation has been revised or not.

For HTML templates, I recommend a similar versioning scheme: define
a constantly-increasing version of these files (either per file, or
globally for all files), and put them into the template. In addition,
put a time stamp into the template indicating when it was last changed.
So a translated HTML file would contain
a) the version number of the English file (project-id-version)
b) the modification date of the English file (pot-creation-date)
c) the modification date of the translation (po-revision-date)

This allows translators to find out what changes need to be done to
what document, even if a translator leaves and a new one joins. It
might also allow mailman to determine whether to display translated
or English documents, e.g. if the translated document is of an
"incompatible" version.

> Besides that Martin, do you have any other input which might help us
> decide whether to move Mailman into the TP or not?

For quite some time now, the TP has the notion of "external" (to the TP)
translations. This allows translators to submit their work directly to
the maintainer (e.g. through CVS) if they wish so. On the TP pages, the
status of these translations will be "external" - telling team members
that they don't need to look into this translation (in the past, they
would start working on a translation, only to find out it already
exists).

Translators would need to "join" their teams, which basically means they
need to introduce themselves to the team leader of their respective
language, indicating that they do the mailman translation. Whether or
not they join the team's mailing list, and whether or not they also look
at the other work of the team is their choice. Joining the team mailing
list is recommended, of course.

Regards,
Martin