a different approach to release announcements and translations thereof

[Peter Zaal]

Hi Dirk,

 

As an active Dutch translator I am sure willing to give this a try. But not
being extremely familiar with the process of submitting changes, can you
give a small explanation/steps on how to do this?

I took a look into the repo and the setup itself is quite easy to
understand. I was fairly happy with translations for the website on
Transifex, but if this is so painful to process and use on the final website
we might try something else (or use more automation?).

I do hope that this will only be for the website and not for all
translations in the end. I feel Transifex is still a great tool for
translators, very easy to use, also for non-technical people which makes it
easier to step in as a translator.

 

The only thing I don't really like in the repo is the
desktop-release-bottom.MD include with the %if page.lang constructs. That is
inconsistent with the other language folder layout, and will bloat over time
with more languages. Maybe this is something you can look into, why not just
a desktop-release-bottom.MD per language in the existing language folder? It
does not seem like a real common file right now.

The other that is not directly clear to me, the difference between posts and
drafts. So is there is process that promotes a draft to a post? Why can a
new announcement not already be in the _posts folder?

 

Peter

 

Van: subsurface <subsurface-bounces at subsurface-divelog.org> Namens Dirk
Hohndel via subsurface
Verzonden: dinsdag 28 april 2020 23:39
Aan: Subsurface Mailing List <subsurface at subsurface-divelog.org>
Onderwerp: a different approach to release announcements and translations
thereof

 

 

For the last few releases I have struggled with the convoluted
infrastructure (which, of course, I have created - so this is all my fault)
for publishing announcements. WordPress had to be hidden from the world (as
we had way too many hacking attempts and the amount of time spent on keeping
this secure and alive was ridiculous), the static export is nice but takes
many manual steps and is pretty error prone. And the integration with
transifex for translations was just painful for everyone involved
(especially me).

 

Based on this. I am once again going to try something different. Something
that's completely integrated with GitHub and should in theory make it easy
for people to translate announcements and maybe even take over some of the
maintenance work from me. Because that's one of the oddities here; several
people over the years have offered to help -- but my setup just wasn't done
in a way where it felt easy to give others access...

 

As a result, we now have a GitHub.com/subsurface/
<http://GitHub.com/subsurface/> subsurface.github.io/
<http://subsurface.github.io/>  repo which then gets published as
https://subsurface.github.io/ via GitHub pages. If this works out, this can
apparently be reasonably easily integrated with our custom domain.

 

The goal right now is NOT to reproduce our website there. Instead I was
hoping to just move our announcements to that URL and allow people to
translate the through a simple pull request. If this turns out to be amazing
and everyone loves it, then we can think about migrating (most of) the full
website, but for now I wanted to focus on the announcements.

 

Posts are written in markdown - just like our README. And typically styling
for announcements is so primitive that the syntax really shouldn't matter
all that much. I have re-created the Subsurface 4.9.3 announcement and
created a Subsurface-mobile 3.0 announcement (which had never been published
anywhere) and have also added a draft for Subsurface 4.9.4. So far I have
only populated a bare basics German translation (that needs a lot more
work), and haven't populated any of the other translations, yet. But I think
that the structure is pretty straight forward and should make it easy for
others to step in and complete my work. 

 

- there's a shared footer for desktop release announcements (aptly named
_includes/desktop-release-bottom.MD) that tells people how to download
binaries. I have this in three languages and it should be obvious how to add
others. The use of variables like {{page.version}} should be quite easy to
understand.

- posts are in subdirectories, currently we have en/ and de/, filenames are
iso-date plus topic, translations are connected via a 'ref' tag in the front
matter (for simplicity I tried to keep this very structured, e.g.
subsurface-4.9.3).

- some terms have central translations (this includes the language short
codes, names, and flags) in _config.yml, but in general most of the
translation work likely consists of copying the English post into the right
directory, keeping the ref in the front matter and translating the actual
announcement text

 

Maybe I'm underestimating the learning curve, but I'd love to hear what
people think - and ideally some of you would try to add our most common
translations (Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese - for those I have created
languages, if you want to add a different one, you'll need to add another
language block in _config.yml).

 

Thanks

 

/D

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.subsurface-divelog.org/pipermail/subsurface/attachments/20200429/45cf2fad/attachment-0001.html>