Since Debconf 6, organizing a series of BOF dedicated to i18n-related topics has proven to be quite useful to all people working on i18n/l10n in the project.

Traditionnally, session 1 is an open talk/round table meant to enlighten the topics to be discussed in other meetings (as well as more informal work sessions during the conference).

Session 1 would be "opening session" as well as the first "work session"

churro: status of server

Services on churro:
(listed on http://i18n.debian.net/wiki)

- l10n material collection: status by nekral
what does it cover (unstable/testing, po-debconf/po/?)
what is using it?

- Pootle. define admins
bubulle: explain what's currently and what's in production
D-I: direct commits to SVN. Missing projects
Debconf: interaction with debian-l10n SVN, need for tools to
grab l10n from SVN. Integrate in po2debconf?

- DDTP: grisu gives status
what about PO export/import
bubulle about PO import to Pootle and perf problems
ddtss: nekral?

- tracking robots: status by nekral

- compendia: status by bubulle

- stats and graphics: status by nekral
Organize this? (pointers on main l10n page?)
Move stats pages to churro?

Server administration and hosting: status by faw
- server admin ML: use d-l-devel?
- move to i18n.debian.org: blockers?
Full event details

Tomorrow, I'll leave /home for more than 3 weeks:

• 10 days with my family in a rented house in Cahors (FR). We might have Internet access there (the owner is indeed installing it and I'll probably help him doing this The Right Way...being interested in the result).
• back at /home on Wednesday Aug. 6th by train
• buy cheese on Aug. 7th (VERY important). Pack it in the bag (round goat cheese inside socks, etc). Also pack some other less important stuff (t-shirts, sweaters, running stuff).
• fly off to DebConf from Paris Orly (Aug 7th, 21:10), via Madrid with Air Europa
• meet Jacobo Tarrio at EZE airport and get our bus to Mar Del Plata
• kiss and hug dozens of friends
• stop sleeping
• enjoy DebConf
• back home on Aug. 18th
• back to work on Aug. 19th (yeah, that's crazy)

For people who are not tired of this, I've had the great honor of being sollicited to hold a keynote lecture at Debconf. As you'd guess, that will be about i18n in Debian. I plan it to be a kinda general thing, giving the current rough picture of how things are going (or not going). No deep technical stuff (aha, how could *I* do that anyway?), just talking with hands. From informations I have, it should be on Aug. 14th, at the beginning of the talks schedule (9:30 or so, local time...check this when the official schedule is out). Apart from that, my personal schedule for DebConf is mostly working with the i18n folks who will be there (Felipe A. van de Wiel aka "faw", Nicolas Fran ois aka "nekral") on the i18n server. Work/talk with Neil Williams about tdebs stuff and all things related to i18n and embedded stuff is also planned as well as preparing the Extremadura meeting we need to have at the end of the year.

There are things that are unique in FLOSS development:

Author: nekral-guest
Date: 2008-04-04 19:43:33 +0000 (Fri, 04 Apr 2008)
New Revision: 1966
Modified:
   debian/trunk/Makefile
Log:
Add a cheesy check.
Modified: debian/trunk/Makefile
===================================================================
--- debian/trunk/Makefile       2008-04-04 18:50:22 UTC (rev 1965)
+++ debian/trunk/Makefile       2008-04-04 19:43:33 UTC (rev 1966)
@@ -1,4 +1,16 @@
 PKG=shadow
 SITE=ftp://pkg-shadow.alioth.debian.org/pub/pkg-shadow/
+deb:: check_cheese
+
 include /usr/share/quilt/quilt.debbuild.mk
+
+check_cheese:
+       @dpkg-parsechangelog   grep -q "\* The \".*\" release\."     \
+               echo ""; \
+               echo " **                                  **"; \
+               echo " **  Warning: not a cheesy release!  **"; \
+               echo " **                                  **"; \
+               echo ""; \
+               exit 1; \
+        

Summary: releases of the Debian shadow package all have the name of a French AOC cheese since July 2005. Nicolas, who was focused on a new upstrram release of shadow inadvertently forgot to add such name for the 4.1.1-1 release and thus added a failure of the package build process in case on forgets the cheese name. We should however give NMUers instructions about the right way to NMU the package, such as giving the name of a local cheese.

Bits from the Debian i18n meeting (Extremadura 2007)

From December 12th to December 15th, Junta de Extremadura hosted another one of the Debian Meetings; five i18n guys shared ideas, food, buses and fun with the Debian KDE maintainers. We would like to thank Extremadura for hosting us during the Hispalinux Meeting 2007, the event was held at Universad de Derecho (Law University) in Caceres, Spain.

These are the minutes, results and notes from our work, it is a brief description but hopefully complete of what we have done and what is still missing/pending.

Thanks to Cesar (cek) we had the chance to work on churro (i18n.debian.net) locally; the server is still running a 2.4 kernel because of some "tick" problems with 2.6 series, the last one tried was 2.6.21 and we should try newer ones, in order to support upgrades and not get stuck with 2.4, we hope Cesar will find time to test new Debian kernels.

First, let me introduce everybody to the services, robots and resources being hosted by i18n.d.n:

• MoinMoin wiki for local and simple reference documentation, it contains all the links to the below resources. (http://i18n.debian.net/wiki/)
• Pootle experimental server
• dl10n scripts, aka dl10n robots (codename Lion), these scripts are responsible for the status of pseudo URLs used by some translation teams, by the Project Smith and by the NMU Priority List for i18n NMU Campaign
• Synchronization of the i18n material used by the Debian website to generate translation statistics about PO and PO-debconf
• Generation of Compendium PO files per-language
• Different types of statistics
• Other non user-visible services like a full source mirror for stable, testing, unstable and experimental, used by the scripts and robots.
• DDTP, Debian Descriptions Translation Project
• DDTSS, The Debian Distributed Translation Server Satellite, a web front-end for DDTP, now integrated to DDTP to use the Database back-end instead of the e-mail interface.

And, at some point, we found important to state clear the acronyms and names used in related DDTP projects/tools:

• DDTS, Debian Description Translation Server, this is the main "back-end" used in DDTP, it tends to be the interface between translator tools (present and future ones) and the database;
• ddt.cgi is a CGI interface that is able to provide info for specific packages or translations, including diffs, related packages and active/inactive descriptions.
• DDTC which is the old (and still functional) command line client for DDTP.

We took the chance to organize a few things on churro, old accounts were cleaned out and removed, we moved from /org to /srv and got more GBs of space to the "playground". Old files were also removed and some are schedule to deletion on early 2008. With the reallocation of /org we also find some more space to /home and /var, we reorganize some of the links on the web space (specially to remove services from people's accounts), and we changed the mirror script to also synchronize the Packages and Contents files.

Grisu and Martijn worked mainly on DDTP and DDTSS integration. DDTSS now provides statistics for stable, testing and unstable, we are also working with Debian Med to provide support and infrastructure to a specific audience, like packages related to Medicine. The conversion to talk directly with DDTP/DDTS database also provided:

• Fetching new translations is almost instantaneous and marks translation as requested (avoiding duplicated works via the e-mail interface).
• After sufficient reviews occurred, the upload is instant
• Committed DDTS / DDTSS / DDTP website generation into SVN
  • Added READMEs for the above directories

DDTSS now announces the user using authentication because of its integration with the Database backend used by DDTP. Quick trivia: DDTP is now a compound of 25 languages occupying 18 GBytes.

A few days before the meeting we had the offer to use "AUTOBYHAND" to upload a package with the Translation-* files. The package is now called 'ddtp-translations' and we worked during the meeting to create scripts to build the package and to test it on the archive side. This approach allow Debian i18n Team to upload new translations and remove old ones (or inactive ones) without bother FTP Master Team. Special thanks to Anthony Town, he has been working with us to prove tips, fixes and info on how to produce the package and the scripts. The code is available in the debian-l10n SVN under pkg-ddtp-translations:
http://svn.debian.org/viewsvn/debian-l10n/pkg-ddtp-translations

In our case, "BYHAND" processing consists of a simple tarball of the main,contrib,non-free /i18n/Translation-*, we decide to work on a set of scripts to make it easier to create new packages (ddtp-translations) in a consistent way and keeping debian/changelog up-to-date. We also made some suggestions to the script what will run on the archive side to check the tarball structure, base on the examples of debian-maintainers and debtags (tags-override).

One of our initial targets for the meeting with regards to Pootle and Debian was to try big PO files per language, fortunately, Nicolas and Friedel were able to increase Pootle performance enough to get a few languages from DDTP loaded in Pootle. Using the upstream Pootle-diet branch, which uses a database back-end for the generation of statistics, the time to browse the DDTP POs of a language (~20.000 files) went down to a dozen of seconds.

Speaking about Pootle, Friedel gave us a good picture of what is coming next in terms of Pootle's development. There are improvements planned in the areas of permissions and rights delegation, as well as file management (for projects and templates). Improved management of terminology projects is also planned.

Improvements in the QA capabilities of the translate toolkit and Pootle are planned to help with the "false positives" of the pofilter checks. Better reuse of existing translations will become possible by using better translation memory techniques. There is also work planned on formats and converters involving, for example, XLIFF, TMX, TRADOS and WordFast.

Another pending task for quite a while was the CVS migration to SVN, it is now done, with a new layout. Commits to the CVS were disabled and every single script or resource depending on CVS should be changed to use SVN. For now, we are publishing (via HTTP) the status files generated by the pseudo-urls robots until we can fix the scripts to re-enable the commit of the files. You can find them here: http://i18n.debian.net/debian-l10n/status/

We are pretty happy with the changes and results of the work during those days, but we still have some items pending on our TODO list:

• More advertisement and usage information about PO Compendiums
  There are two use cases are identified:
  
  • Filling new PO files.
  • QA work to find inconsistent translations.
  Maybe Eddy would love to do that? :-)
• Extend the duration of the statistics history. (Nekral)
• Debian packages of the services running on churro
  • DDTP (Grisu)
  • DDTSS (Martijn)
  • dl10n (Nekral)
• DDTP: add some scripts to handle packages with version in the description (e.g. kernel and kernel modules) (Martijn)
• DDTP: Standard generation of the translation tarballs (faw)
• DDTP: document the bracketed stats on the main page (faw)
• DDTC: should be updated to match the current features. Documentation to ease integration with procmail. (Nekral - low priority)
• Implement mail service for translation teams with their own robots (e.g. Dutch) (faw)
• Collect data from http://www.debian.org/devel/website/stats/ (Nekral)
• http://www.debian.org/intl/l10n/po/,
  http://www.debian.org/intl/l10n/po-debconf/
  are built based on the churro material. It would make more sense to build these statistics on churro (Nekral)
  • We could "fork" the page and add some fancy new features on these pages (Nekral)
  • Add information from the coordination page to indicate that a translation is ongoing. (Nekral)
• Pootle: missing review indication. Hard with PO back-end. (Friedel)

There are a couple more reports to be sent but they are more focused on i18n specific questions, tools and plans for 2008. So, probably those will be sent only to debian-i18n mail list. If you are interested, please, stay tuned. :-)

Posted on d-d-a: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/01/msg00002.html
And a big thanks to Nicolas François (aka nekral), he helped me a lot making notes, preparing the text and reviewing it; and was patient enough to wait for the report while I was solving some personal problems.

Ah. Back home. All in all, it was a quite nice trip. I like to get actually to meet the people that I communicate a lot electronically with. Thanks Extremadura for making this happen. The last day, we stayed at the residense instead of going to the local university, as the internet at the residense was much more stable than the one at the university.
But it was still heavily firewalled. Having the svn:// port firewalled doesn’t make it too easy to work with svn - and having ssh connection time out every 5 minutes also makes it difficult to try work on some remote machine. Please. Get the network better for next time. And more bandwidth. And thanks to Nekral for the champagne && cheese ;) Now tired - and times to sleep.

Congratulations to Yves-Alexis Perez (Corsac), Nicolas Fran ois (Nekral) and Sune Vuorela (Pusling) too \o/ Finally, some accounts (~30 ?) were created and i’m in. Thanks to all people involved in Debian and Kubuntu. In particular (no order) my co-maintainers, sponsors, helpers and application manager:
* Pierre habouzit (Madcoder)
* Mark Purcell (msp)
* Ana Beatriz Guerrero (Ana)
* Enrico Zini (enrico)
* Gustavo Franco (stratus)
* Lo c Minier (lool)
* Jonathan Riddell (riddell)
* Sarah Hobbs (hobbsee)
* and many many others But I don’t forget other people who missed this train: Cyril Brulebois (kibi). Next time, it’s your turn ! (i hope soon).

Today, Nicolas "nekral" Fran ois and I spent some time on the remaining issues of the shadow package. As the package is part of the base system, it was frozen for a while now. Thankfully for us, our upstream was nearly inactive in the meantime (no new version) and the issues reported in the BTS in the meantime were pretty minor (indeed, several of them are unreproducible, often errors in users' PAM settings). So, now we're back on duty to make the bug count for that package down to 0 (there are 17 opened bugs as of now). Our upstream seem to come back to life so we will probably do our best to lower the size of the Debian diff.gz file which raised again in the last months of the sarge->etch release cycle.

The answer to my previous question is "to be". That happened thanks to a bunch of people, in no particular order:

• Jens Sidel, for committing and suggesting early activation and advices about switching to PO format
• Christian Perrier, for being a really nice guy and for being the person that made me click and start contributing to Debian
• Kobayashi Noritada, for magic po4a related commands
  
• Frans Pop, for actually activating the thing and for advices
• Andrei Popescu, for the multiple patches sent and the late hours sacrificed on the Romanian localization altar
  
• Stan Ioan Eugen, for the work done on the translation done for 1.119, multiple comments and comments done at really late hours last night
• Dan Damian, for being the first person to translate the Release Notes in Romanian, at my suggestion
• Ru e Zeno, for comments and suggestions
• Denis Barbier and Martin Quinson for creating po4a
• Nicolas Fran ois (aka nekral) for maintaining po4a
• Javier Fern ndez-Sanguino Pe a, for making calls to translations and sacrificing the Spanish translation while working on the English text to bringing it in shape
  
• anyone that I forgot or don't know about and had a role in making this possible
• silent reviewers on the debian-l10n-romanian list - I wish you started speaking instead of unsubscribing

Updates:

• David Roundy, for creating darcs with its nice darcs send feature which allowed parallel work
  

This is the sound of Galician po-debconf translations being given a big push with the last upload of dbconfig-common and its 101 strings for po-debconf. I'm amazed by the current effort of Magic Jacobo who is doing alone all this effort. Simultaneously, the Portuguese team has definitely beaten up the Brazilian team and the Catalan team is still running after world domination. Czech and German are progressing rapidly and all this should be soon available as nice graphs thanks to the work of Nicolas Fran ois.