po-debconf-manager: managing translations of debconf templates

Type: Lightning talk

Room: MDC room

Time: Nov 17 (Sun): 14:09

Duration: 0:07

There are at least 440 packages with debconf templates that can be translated. Many have very few strings. For example, only 1625 out of the 5866 strings have been translated into Catalan. po-debconf-manager is a working experiment to help a translation team to coordinate translating, reviewing and pushing the changes to the packages.

Principal ideas: - low maintenance: no new infrastructure needed (no database, no new server, etc.) - command line interface (possibility to output a website in the future). No email coordination (but could send email notifications) - translators, reviewers and managers do 100% asynchronous work - interact with the Debian packages via automated merge requests in Salsa

Main goals: fun, easy to use, agile, modern system. Hopefully, it will bring more translators to Debian who could eventually contribute to the wider ecosystem.

I’ll show how it works and how we have been using it for some Catalan translations with the debian-l10n-catalan team. I am open for feedback. I want to explore leveraging git to coordinate workflows in other areas.

Salsa URL: https://salsa.debian.org/carlespina/po-debconf-manager