Re: Hey, what's happening here?

[Mohammed Elzubeir <elzubeir at fakkir dot net>]

On Wed, Jan 02, 2002 at 10:18:07PM -0500, Waseem S Bakr wrote:
> Hey, we seem to have lost some versions in the latest CVS update! Yesterday, we had over 90% of kdebase done (it was something like 91% or 92%) Today, we slipped back to 88%! For example, the file I translated completely yesterday (kcmkicker) has been updated to version 1.6, which looks like version 1.3 (which was only about 30% translated.) Luckily, the translation was not lost (version 1.5 still exists.) Similarly, all of the files I updated yesterday (about 8 files) have gone back to previous versions. Was this an update or a "downdate"? I hate to see all the beautiful green bars in the barchart go back to ugly old blue (red is even worse!)


Unfortunately that is what I call the 'lost translation' effect :( The good news is, it's not that bad.
Let me explain what happens:

Periodically (depending on how much translation is going on), I commit our changes to the KDE CVS. After
that, it takes them 1-3 days to update the PO files that we submit with the new and modified strings. 

What strings? you say.. since KDE applications are always in active development the strings in their
output, and mostly their location in the source code file (C++, etc). That is, as they add things to
their programs, more lines of code, or less lines of code.. the locations (line numbers) of where those
output strings reside change.. and so the PO files have to change.

So, during this 1-3 day period, the files on the KDE CVS are merged with the new versions. Then, I take
those out, and commit them here. Now, this is not the best way to do this, and I _am_ looking into
automating this process so we don't have this 'patching' job later. But, as it is, currently, this
brings our files upto date with the latest PO's. 

So, what is lost? What is lost is, what you have translated in the period since the time I committed the
files to the KDE CVS repository and when I update our CVS repository after they do their merge.

But that's 'lost'? No, of course not. Everything you commit to the CVS repository is there, so you can
bring back an older version of the file, and stick in the translations that you have made before
(cut/paste), whatever works for you.

So this is always the case? No, thankfully not. There are 'freeze' periods, where the KDE developers are
asked not to make any changes to the strings. This enables the translators to catch-up with the latest
version.

And that is all she wrote ;)
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