Hello,
The files in the languages/messages/ directory are quite big and currently altered every day. Yesterday, I had to bisect a bug and most of the delay was caused by fetching the languages files.
I do not understand the purpose of this daily update, does it serves any specific purpose? I do not feel like we require up-to-date translations in trunk.
I have a similar issue with not so much edited extensions for which the log is mostly i18n translations thus hiding the real code commits.
That was just my Sunday morning 2 cents.
On Sun, May 29, 2011 at 5:16 PM, Ashar Voultoiz hashar+wmf@free.fr wrote:
I do not understand the purpose of this daily update, does it serves any specific purpose? I do not feel like we require up-to-date translations in trunk.
Trunk is designed to be up-to-date, if it wasn't done on TW and locally on our SVN, the same thing would be happening.
2011/5/29 Ashar Voultoiz hashar+wmf@free.fr:
I do not understand the purpose of this daily update, does it serves any specific purpose? I do not feel like we require up-to-date translations in trunk.
The purpose of the frequent updates is to give the translators a feeling that something actually happens with the work they do. On a wiki an editor sees his changes immediately, which is a Good Thing, and the translation system tries to get as close as possible to that.
I am working with many other software translation websites - Launchpad (Rosetta), GlotPress, BabelZilla, Narro and others. None of them gets anywhere near Translatewiki.net in giving to the translators that good feeling that their work is seen by other people. This good feeling is one of the main things that drives the translators to translate more. This is a strong and frequently overlooked advantage, which the MediaWiki community has over many other localized software communities, and it must be kept.
That said, being a coder myself, i can understand that it can be a burden on the developers, and i would welcome any solution that doesn't ruin the above-mentioned advantage. Maybe a separate repo for translations?.. Sorry, i'm not much of an SCM expert.
On 11-05-29 12:34 AM, Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
2011/5/29 Ashar Voultoiz hashar+wmf@free.fr:
I do not understand the purpose of this daily update, does it serves any specific purpose? I do not feel like we require up-to-date translations in trunk.
The purpose of the frequent updates is to give the translators a feeling that something actually happens with the work they do. On a wiki an editor sees his changes immediately, which is a Good Thing, and the translation system tries to get as close as possible to that.
I am working with many other software translation websites - Launchpad (Rosetta), GlotPress, BabelZilla, Narro and others. None of them gets anywhere near Translatewiki.net in giving to the translators that good feeling that their work is seen by other people. This good feeling is one of the main things that drives the translators to translate more. This is a strong and frequently overlooked advantage, which the MediaWiki community has over many other localized software communities, and it must be kept.
That said, being a coder myself, i can understand that it can be a burden on the developers, and i would welcome any solution that doesn't ruin the above-mentioned advantage. Maybe a separate repo for translations?.. Sorry, i'm not much of an SCM expert.
Just a thought that came into my head...
If our i18n system's messages weren't php based. And we filtered out hazardous things like the .css/.js pages. And made sure that we didn't have raw-html messages lying around. Wouldn't that remove the burden of potential arbitrary code execution, and XSS, and make it possible to update translations nearly instantaneously? At the very least after a message has simply been peer-reviewed by a few other users who have translated a good bit before and earned a reputation (code based one as it may be). Or at least just with the ability to preview a public wiki with one's own translations.
Can't think of anything more motivating than seeing the message you updated show up on Wikipedia while you're browsing shortly after you update it.
On 29.05.2011, 11:16 Ashar wrote:
The files in the languages/messages/ directory are quite big and currently altered every day. Yesterday, I had to bisect a bug and most of the delay was caused by fetching the languages files.
I use the git mirror at Github for bisecting, it works almost instaneously.
I do not understand the purpose of this daily update, does it serves any specific purpose? I do not feel like we require up-to-date translations in trunk.
In theory, it is possible to push l18n updates to live site using Ext:LocalisationUpdate, but I'm not sure if it is practiced these2 days due to huge lag between trunk and WMF cluster.
I have a similar issue with not so much edited extensions for which the log is mostly i18n translations thus hiding the real code commits.
Then CR should be fixed to allow more flexible filtering, not development process be pushed 5 years back.
On Sun, May 29, 2011 at 9:40 AM, Max Semenik maxsem.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
In theory, it is possible to push l18n updates to live site using Ext:LocalisationUpdate, but I'm not sure if it is practiced these2 days due to huge lag between trunk and WMF cluster.
Yes, we still do this. The gap between trunk and deployment means that not everything can be updated (LU doesn't like it when message files are renamed, and will refuse to update messages whose English version has changed). However, most messages are fairly stable, so this process works fairly well in practice.
Roan Kattouw (Catrope)
Am 29.05.2011 09:40, schrieb Max Semenik:
On 29.05.2011, 11:16 Ashar wrote:
I do not understand the purpose of this daily update, does it serves any specific purpose? I do not feel like we require up-to-date translations in trunk.
In theory, it is possible to push l18n updates to live site using Ext:LocalisationUpdate, but I'm not sure if it is practiced these2 days due to huge lag between trunk and WMF cluster.
Yes, it works very well. (Nearly) Every day Siebrand or I export all new translations from Translatewiki to MediaWiki SVN. Extension:LocalisationUpdate is enabled on all WMF wikis and a cron job runs every night to update the message cache.
Since LocalisationUpdate was enabled (a year ago?) it is a huge improvement for the i18n of MediaWiki on WMF projects.
Raimond.
ad hoc solution: see https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29198 Proposal: "prevent LU update" file as a flag to prevent from unexpected languages/messages during agile development
have a nice weekend Tom
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