Disappearing translations and maintaining consistency over branches

[Karl Ove Hufthammer]

Edward Wornar skreiv 28.11.2021 13:53:
>> Notice that stable project points to the trunk branch, and trunk project
>> points to the stable branch.
>>
>> That way if I translate something in stable then it goes into trunk and
>> in reverse. It happens automatically. Hope it will help you.
> Thanks, that could actually be easier than the other approach which gave me a
> strange additional directory on my first tries.

Well, I don’t think this is any *easier*. With this approach, you really 
need three separate projects (one for trunk, one for l10n-kf5 and one 
for l10n-kf5-plasma-lts). If the strings are not identical in all three 
branches for an application, you’ll have to open each project in 
Lokalize and edit three different versions of the PO file to ensure that 
translation is complete in all branches. For example, you’ll need to 
edit all three of:

./branches/stable/l10n-kf5-plasma-lts/xx/messages/plasma-workspace/klipper.po
./branches/stable/l10n-kf5/xx/messages/plasma-workspace/klipper.po
./trunk/l10n-kf5/xx/messages/plasma-workspace/klipper.po

(And in some cases, the name of the file is not identical in the three 
branches.)

If you instead use the PO summit, you‘ll only have to manage *one* 
project and edit *one* file:

./trunk/l10n-support/xx/summit/messages/plasma-workspace/klipper.po

And if the wording of a string has been improved in ‘trunk’, the string 
will usually be shown right before/after the corresponding ‘stable’ 
string in the summit file, so that you can easily make the same 
improvement (if relevant) for the stable version. Then the ‘stable’ 
translation will actually be of *higher* quality than the original 
English string (which can’t be changed, because of the string freeze).

So, with one minor exception, I can’t actually see any *advantage* of 
using a non-summit workflow. It’s more complicated, and it’s more 
error-prone.

(The one exception is that if you, for some strange reason, only want to 
translate ‘stable’ applications, or only want to translate ‘trunk’ 
application, you can avoid translating the other strings. But note that 
some applications are released directly from ‘trunk’, so that means that 
some applications are never translated.)


-- 
Karl Ove Hufthammer