Re: [Doudoulinux-dev] Uploading DouDouLinux packages to Debian
Hi Jean-Michel,
On Sat, Feb 08, 2014 at 12:35:12AM +0100, Jean-Michel Philippe wrote:
>
> I'm not sure we're speaking about the same kind of lists. You seem to be
> speaking about making meta-packages lists while I was speaking about the
> list of packages available from our custom DoudouLinux repository, the
> candidates for upload into the Debian archive.
I keep on thinking we are speaking about the same kind of list. You can
add so called prospective packages to the list of existing packages:
http://blends.debian.org/blends/ch08.html#packageslist
> > http://blends.debian.org/blends/ch08.html#edittasksfiles
> >
> > So everybody knows our TODO list and you can add the location of your
> > DoudouLinux inofficial packages as "Pkg-URL" field where we can grab
> > from and move it to main Debian.
>
> Currently we maintain several text files that are compatible with Debian
> Live package lists. These text files are then turned into Debian
> packages by a script.
>
> As I understand your notice, we should process in the reverse way: write
> the text file fitting the meta-package syntax for Debian blends tools
> then, eventually, turn them into Live lists if we don't want to use
> meta-packages in Live systems (but I can't see why as long as
> meta-packages get built within a short period).
The idea is to use metapackages on the live CD. The advantage is that
the metapackage creation procedure is verifying the availability of a
package once it is created. So in the long run maintaining the
metapackages is less work for with the additional profit of having
several QA tools and the web sentinel pages (where I created the
examples for).
> > Are these translations of package descriptions or translations of the
> > according software? In any case I think your translators would be very
> > well advised to work together with the according upstream. Having good
> > translations hanging around at "random places" (and DoudouLinux is some
> > random place) simply sucks and will trigger the need for duplicated
> > work.
>
> I agree of course, but this is not as simple. Most of translators just
> accept to translate (NB: applications, not descriptions of packages). We
> have around 75 user applications in DoudouLinux. Sending translations
> manually to every upstream project is a huge work. I believe this is the
> main reason why nobody has decided yet to do this job for the whole
> translation team.
You might like to try filing a bug report with your translation patch to
the Debian bug tracking system. If the maintainer of the package might
include this at least into the Debian package you will not have
additional work. May be he even forwards the patch upstream. I agree
that your translators doing a lot of work but doing it for DoudouLinux
exclusively is somehow in contrary to the cooperation principle of Free
Software and thus not sustainable. You personally confirmed beeing
short of time. Simply assume you might become even shorter of time and
your children will grow up so you personal motivation in creating a
children distribution might fade away. Once DoudouLinux might not be
maintained any more (just assuming for a moment) all the huge work of
the translators might be done for the dustbin if it is not propagated to
the place where it really belongs to. So spending a fraction of time to
getting things done right might have the effort of getting less work
done but its done in a sustainable way.
> On the contrary, one reason why translators would prefer to come and
> translate for DoudouLinux rather than for each upstream project
> separately, is that they can access all of them from a single point
> thanks to our translation portal on Transifex:
>
> https://www.transifex.com/projects/p/doudoulinux/
>
> We had an interesting discussion on this topic very recently on our
> lists:
>
> https://mail.gna.org/public/doudoulinux-lang/2014-01/msg00000.html
>
> We probably need to write additional tools to increase translators
> motivation as well as to improve the sharing of our work with upstream
> projects.
Please do NOT write another translation tool. There are others out
there and the most knowledge about these tools can be obtained from
debian-i18n@lists.debian.org. Please make sure you will not spend
your time in reinventing the wheel.
> > Reasonable upstreams have some bug tracking system. Please make sure
> > that your nice work becomes available for everybody! If it is about
> > package translations you can use straight DDTP server (see also links to
> > translations on the web sentinel pages I was linking to above).
>
> DDTP servers? What does DDTP mean?
You might like to click on one of the yellow "Translate description"
buttons on the doudou-* tasks I linked to to see DDTP in action. More
infor is here:
https://www.debian.org/international/l10n/ddtp
While this is Debian specific and may be not the tool you want - the
people on the mailing list behind will be able to give you reasonable
advise (which I personally can not).
> > As I said: Reasonable upstream usually have a bug tracking system or any
> > contact point you can send the translation to. This information should
> > be also in the according debian/copyright file.
>
> Yes, honestly we'd like, but we always need to find a good balance
> between perfection and action. Because of our limited resources, we
> always have to choose between making things better in the back-office or
> making things better for the end-user. As we don't know in advance how
> upstream developers will be interested in our work, it is very hard to
> decide to spend much time in sending upstream everything we do.
> Unfortunately we don't get a warm welcome every time. As a result, we
> partly share our work with upstream only, certainly too little.
As I said above it might be that the Debian Maintainers might serve as
proxy to upstream if you send patches to the BTS using reportbug.
Kind regards
Andreas.
--
http://fam-tille.de
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