[translations] About packaging of translations.

[Gábor Hojtsy]

On Wed, Feb 27, 2008 at 1:13 PM, Jose A. Reyero <drupal at reyero.net> wrote:
>  It seems I've finally got the Spanish translation package right, from
>  the l10n server export :-)
>  (Thanks Gabor)

:) Thanks for submitting bugfixes :)

>  Now I was thinking how cool it would be to have a downloadable
>  "Drupal-Spanish" package that included Drupal 6.0 + the translation.
>
>  So is there any plan/any chance for having the packaging scripts
>  producing both packages, a Drupal + translation and one with the
>  translation alone?

There were some plans to support building install profiles to
downloadable distributions, but these seem to be stalled with people
swamped with other tasks. There were lots of discussions on
groups.drupal.org about this.

>  For now, I think I'll do it manually and make it available on the Drupal
>  Spanish site (http://drupal.org.es). However I'd like to know if someone
>  else is doing such thing for other languages and how was the experience.
>  I think maybe the downside of it is that you need to be upgrading the
>  package with the new future core versions with security fixes ASAP for
>  not letting the users at risk...

There were a few reasons we did not do this on drupal.hu (although
some people thought we do this for some time :):

 - we would need to update the tarball with each new security or bugfix release
 - we would remove our downloads from the drupal.org download counter
 - we would offer a package on our own server and we'd need to ensure
its security

People downloading a localized Drupal from your server expect that it
is a secure (identical to drupal.org with translations added) version.
While you can try to ensure this, you cannot be absolutely sure.

I'd say I am much more comfortable with linking to the official core
packages and our translation packages separately. Then it is not my
business to ensure the files are not corrupted (incidentally or by an
intruder) and that I did not do anything to broke them. Sure, this is
a bit harder for users, but I say this small initial complexity
increase also helps them understand how the translations tie into
Drupal, to update translations when the Drupal core is not to be
updated for example.

Gabor