lynx-dev Re: Hello/LYNX

[Webmaster Jim]

On Wed, Jun 23, 1999 at 01:18:54AM -0400, François Pinard wrote:
> Webmaster Jim <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > Most of the developers of Lynx only know English, but that hasn't
> > stopped us trying to make it available to others.  So far, many messages
> > have been translated to French (and more to German).  The French
> > translations came from Lynx users in Canada.  I'm hoping for translated
> > versions of help pages and other documents (real soon now).
> 
> > There is a Free Translation Project that may have volunteers who could
> > do this (http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard).  Any other help you could
> > give would be appreciated.
> 
> Hello, people.  I'm not sure to whom I should write exactly, I'm
> sorry if I'm writing to too many people.
> 
> Let me try to get the `lynx' project moving in the Translation Project
> before going to sleep.  A few irregularities in the `lynx' packaging got
> me procrastinating until I could find some quiet time for thinking out
> the difficulties.  With your help, hopefully, we will smooth these out
> progressively, while the wheel acquires speed.

Great!  We have a lot of irregulars amongst our developers, myself
included :-).
 
> First, I initialised the domain this way:
> 
>   <domain>lynx<mailto>address@hidden
>    <disclaim><pretest>
>    <url>http://www.slcc.edu/lynx/current/lynx2.8.3dev.2.tar.gz
>    <url>ftp://lynx.isc.org/current/lynx2.8.3dev.2.tar.gz
> 
> presuming that I should send notifications for translated (ready) PO files
> to <address@hidden>, without sending the actual contents of PO files,
> just the URL in the archive.  I also presumed that the maintainer does want
> translation disclaimers for translations.  Correct me where I'm wrong.

I'm the unofficial maintainer, but perhaps address@hidden should be
the target address. Or better yet, Rob Partington could create an email
alias in the browser.org domain that forwards to me and other potential
maintainers (lynx-po at browser.org?).

No one on the lynx dev list has stated preferences for translation
disclaimers.  I don't require them.

> We usually publish for translators a precise URL, rather than a directory,
> so they could just use batch tools like `wget' to get the distribution,
> so I made this correction above.
> 
> The version naming scheme is new for the Translation Project.  Did I
> send you the information found within:
> 
>    http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/contrib/po/HTML/reply-maintainers.html
> 
> The are three schemes for version naming described in there.  If you use any
> other scheme, I have to modify many scripts, and we have to prepare for this.
> This distribution does not unpack in a directory predictable from the archive
> name, the way which is usual for us.  For example, "lynx2.8.3dev.2" unpacks
> within "lynx2-8-3".  This also breaks some other scripts.  Would you accept
> considering following GNU standards for packaging?  That would be the easiest
> for me, but if you do not want to, we might have to work out something.

There are historical reasons for the Lynx archive structure, mainly
because a lot of development was done on VMS, which only allows one
"dot" per filename. Win32 also can act wierdly with many dots in
filenames. I think our workaround should be for me to unpack and
repack the distribution in my scripts that to the source checkout for
mirroring. Let me think on this.

> To get out of all this, I extracted the POT file by hand instead of
> automatically, and gave it the name lynx-2.8.3.pot, hoping that you will not
> have other later POT files needing to be called that way, because a POT file
> with given version numbers can only be uploaded once in the Translation
> Project (once the wheel turns, we may change ideas at the very beginning).

I'm wondering why you didn't use the Lynx-2.8.2 release, so that
translators all start with a stable version? We update the "current"
version a few times a month, which will make extra work when messages
and lines change. We will be releasing new 2.8.3-dev versions, then
later a 2.8.3-pre version, and then a 2.8.3-rel (release) version.

> The next problem is that the POT file header is quite incorrect: it
> comes from a very old version of `xgettext'. The Translation Project
> did not use that format for a long time, it is quite obsolete by now.
> Please grab:
>
>    http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/contrib/po/gettext-0.10.35.tar.gz
>
> and use this instead of the old "official" release. I know that a
> new release is overdue, but don't kill me, as I'm not the one doing
> the releases for this package. :-) Moreover, there is a serious
> canonicalisation bug in 0.10.35 (the old "official" release is
> infinitely worse) that the Translation Project corrects automatically
> in all POT and PO files it handles. We have to find ways to live with
> the current situation until the next `gettext'.

The main reason I used the old version is that is what is on the Gnu FTP
site, including when I looked a few weeks ago. My (humble) opinion is
that you've got to convince the Gnu folks to standardize on your version
before convincing me to use it.

> I reformatted the POT file header by hand, and tried to force
> submission. You should have received a notification by now. Let me
> check... Yes, the POT file is now part of the PO Central Archives.
> Wow, 1040 messages to translate. This will not be the smallest of our
> packages :-).

Thank you for your work on this. Since most of us do not have the
experience that you do with translations, please forgive our mistakes.

> OK. I'll now inform the national team leaders about the existence
> of this new textual domain. I presume we all agree that the textual
> domain is going to be exactly `lynx'.

"Exactly" -- Curly of the 3 Stooges :-)

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