Lokalization for KDE AppStream AppData files

[Aleix Pol]

On Thu, Feb 20, 2014 at 6:54 PM, Matthias Klumpp <matthias at tenstral.net>wrote:

> Hi!
> I am working on bringing AppData to KDE. AppData is a XML-based
> metadata format to enhance information displayed about applications in
> software-centers. It, for example, includes long descriptions of an
> application, homepage links, donation-links, screenshot-info and some
> other information about the application.
> AppStream is a Freedesktop project enabling us to build cross-distro
> software centers. GNOME is already making heavy use of it for their
> GNOME-Software application, and KDE also uses it already in Apper and
> probably Muon soon.
> One challenge for KDE is how to handle localizations for AppData
> information.
> I would propose the following:
>  * KDE applications ship an <app>.appdata.xml.in file, containing the
> raw, untranslated data.
>  * We extend messages.sh to scan the XML file and return the found
> strings to the generic pot file, which is then translated by our
> localization teams as usual.
>  * At build-time, we use intltool[1] to merge the translation with the
> AppData file, then install it into it's target directory.
> This is basically it. The only thing KDE projects need to do is to
> edit their Messages.sh and depend on intltool to merge localization. I
> could also provide a cmake macro for doing that to
> extra-cmake-modules, if needed.
> Do you have comments or suggestions on this?
> I would later add it to the wiki page I'm doing to describe how KDE
> projects which want to use AppData can easily use it.
> Kind regards,
>     Matthias
>
> Links:
> [1]: http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/intltool/
> AppStream: http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Distributions/AppStream/
> AppData: http://people.freedesktop.org/~hughsient/appdata/
> greetings to people who watched my FOSDEM talk ;-)
>
> --
> Debian Developer | Freedesktop-Developer
> I welcome VSRE emails. See http://vsre.info/
>

Hi Matthias!
I'm very happy to see you pushing this forward. Muon will be supporting
this format from the next released version (to some extent) and I'm sure
this will increase over time.

Regarding localization, Albert is the man here. If he says it's done in a
way, you do it this way. ;-)
More seriously though, I agree that it's doesn't make much sense to have it
generated at build time, since this would require having all translations
installed. Maybe we can figure out a mechanism appdata -> po -> appdata
like in the desktop files. It works great there for desktop files, and it's
the exact same use-case.

Aleix
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