On 9/25/05, Gabor Hojtsy <gabor@hojtsy.hu> wrote:
This is all possible with CVS, but of course CVS is not easy enough for quite some folks. You get commit messages exactly as you described, plus you have version control, which is already proven. Using simple text files (PO files) the diffs are even easier to read then those XML files, you reindent, and all the lines suddenly changed. It is unfortunate, that CVS is not easy for quite some people, but IMHO it does not mean we should create a whole new system. The Tortoise tools for Windows are quite good in simlifying CVS/SVN.
[snip]
Not that we have no need to deal with international charsets, as we only support utf8, nothing else. PO editors do utf8 well. Let us know the advantages of switching formats, switching desktop tools, writing new import/export code along your suggestion please.
I don't think there is any need to abandon PO as a format for translators to work in. My main point was that if the text is going to be moved to the database (as per the original suggestion) then an online translation tool is an obvious next step (see below). We would have to write import code to import the existing translations anyhow! As for XML, I just wanted to point out that a standard already exists, and we should avoid making up our own (if we choose to support XML import/export) unless there are good reasons. I don't have much knowledge (or opinions) about about PO vs. XLIFF, but http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-i18n/2003-October/msg00032.html seems to have some interesting points.
What is not possible now? What is going to be better?
I think you explained it yourself in your first paragraph. The technical hurdles to learning translation tools and CVS are quite high. While there is no problem with what we have now (other than suggested in the Larry's original summary) there are always non-technical people who want to contribute to open source projects, and translation is an ideal opportunity to allow this. I feel that having the option of using a web-based tool to allow this is good. If I18N is important to Drupal (and it obviously widens the potential market) then the volume of translation will have to increase exponentially, and hence the more accessible we can make the translation the better. - Grug