[GNC-dev] Update of translator-credits; was: Acknowledgement as Dutch translator

[john]

> On Dec 18, 2023, at 22:35, Frank H. Ellenberger <frank.h.ellenberger at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> Am 19.12.23 um 02:30 schrieb john:
>>> On Dec 18, 2023, at 13:14, Frank H. Ellenberger <frank.h.ellenberger at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> I don't know if we really want all translators of all languages in the AUTHORS file.
>> ISTM it should be all or nothing: If we're not going to include all of the current translators  we should remove everybody whose only contribution is translation. But the translator-credits mechanism isn't great: Users see only the people who helped translate into the current UI language, so if the language is set to US English they see no-one at all.
>> Regards,
>> John Ralls
> 
> IIRC Authors and Translators had separate tabs in GTK2's About.
> 
> How about adding a linking sentence like:
> For translation contributors see the list at the beginning of each .po file.
> 
> An automatic greping of the list is not trivial as it sits between file description (0-2 lines) and the general translator comment (0-n lines).
> 
> Not all mentioned with "translation" in Authors are listed in the respective po file. Perhaps they contributed e.g. localized account templates? Is it really worth to grep the logs for them?
> 
> Just my 2c
> Frank

Adding a pointer the po files is a cop-out, nobody will go to the effort. The localized account templates are an interesting thought, but I wouldn't consider that a translation in most cases.  The point of those templates is as much to reflect how people in a locale structure their books as it is to have account names in the locale language

The translator-credits msgid also falls short because it's manually maintained: For example both the fr.po and de.po have more translator names in the comments in the header than in translator-credits. You're right that grepping the comments won't be easy. Not only is there no tag to indicate the list beginning and ending, even the formatting and text before and after the list isn't consistent between PO files.

Unfortunately even querying the commit history won't get everybody. In fact it won't get much of anybody before we switched to git because CVS and Subversion don't record separate authors and committers. It's really before Weblate even: The usual way translations got updated until then was somebody would send a new po file to one of the mailing lists and a developer would copy it into his working directory and commit it. Not everybody was conscientious about including the translator's name in the commit message. That applies as much to code contributors as to translators. Before git we got patches via bugzilla. Developers would download patches, apply, and commit. Sometimes they credited the author in the commit message, sometimes not, and adding the author to AUTHORS was and is even less frequent. There are also contributors whose privacy concerns outweigh their interest in getting credit for their work.

Bottom line is that there's no way to give credit to everyone who's contributed or even everyone who's made substantial contributions.

Regards,
John Ralls