Ubuntu Wiki

THIS IS CURRENTLY A DRAFT

Introduction

The purpose of this page is to document the lifecycle of translations in Kubuntu since the import from upstream until they are shown to users.

Import workflow for KDE core

• Upstream:
  • The upstream sources are gettextized (actually, qt'ized) but do not contain translations (PO files).
  • All translations (PO files) are shipped in a separate tarball for each language (kde-l10n-xx)
• Packaging:
  • Those sources are packaged as .deb packages:
  • The applications' sources are packaged
  • The kde-l10n-xx sources, containing exclusively translations, are packaged
• Build:
  • The applications' binary packages generate POT files on build (the names of the POT files are extracted from a Messages.sh file in the sources.)
  • The kde-l10n-xx binary packages, do _not_ generate POT files on build
• Import:
  • The application's POT files are put in the import queue upon upload of the application package to the archive
  • The PO files are put in the import queue upon upload of the kde-l10n-xx package to the archive

The main difference between GNOME/extragear/other and KDE4 core (as far as the import into Launchpad goes) is that the first ones generally have a single template (domain) per source package, whereas the latter have got many templates (domains) per source packages.

• Issues:
  • Some upstream sources (e.g. KTorrent) do not contain the Messages.sh file, which needs to be added in the package
  • The kde-l10n packages contain more translated content other than PO files (audio files, pictures, etc.). It should be investigated whether it is worth installing them by default.
  • Quassel and Arora are in main and use Qt's translation system and produce .qm files. As a result, these don't get in language packs at all. Qt translation import is not trivial, since Qt use their own XML-based format, which is supported by gettext (but reportedly always one step behind, which prevents both Kubuntu and upstream from using gettex).

The kde-l10n packages and language packs

Kubuntu developer tools related to translations

• batl10n is a script that assists Kubuntu packagers with KDE updates. It mostly just walks through all kde-l10n tarballs, merges the packaging in and create ready-to-upload source packages (in the process it can also apply batch changes of course).

• KDE l10n orphans parser

CategoryTranslations