Localization tools are a pity. The Hebrew localizers switched from one tool to the other, and attached a patch to bug 373436, +1190/-818 lines for toolkit alone. Given that toolkit ‘only’ has some 2000 strings, that’s a pretty big diff.
I wrote a diff tool that ignores all the formatting and ordering, and oops. The actual changes boil down to +6/-6. Even worse, I can hardly a- that patch, if I want that localization to go forward.
To anyone pondering to write l10n tools, would you please consider writing them with Openess in your mind? Tool lock-in is not an option, even if it spares you half a day of work to write a decent serialization architecture.
Oh, and don’t ask me to endorse your tool until bugs like this are fixed.
</rant>
I agree a 100%. We at nl-NL don’t use Mozilla Translator for this reason, and we’ve actually spent a lot of time undoing the changes in the messed-up DTD files from the time when Mozilla Translator was being used.
~Grauw
Comment by Laurens Holst — June 26, 2007 @ 4:55 am
Actually, in this case it’s probably MT and translate toolkit making up different things, which is why things blow up this bad. Both tools are equally to blame here.
Comment by Axel Hecht — June 26, 2007 @ 5:12 am
In fact, we didn’t even changed a localization tool. We are using MozillaTranslator, and for some reasons, one day it stated producing files in another order.
We’ve tried to downgrade the tool, and even recreate the database, but it didn’t solve the problem, and we are no stuck with massive file changes due to another order requirements only.
Here is my vote for new l10n tools, with no Java involved.
Comment by Tomer Cohen, Mozilla Israel — June 26, 2007 @ 6:43 am
Same is true for addons.mozilla.org l10n. The developers use some automated gettext tools on all locales but en-US that sorts all strings in alphabetical order. Every time I work on my localization of the site, I start by doing: create backup + svn update + apply backup + svn commit to revert those changes.
Comment by Jesper Kristensen — June 26, 2007 @ 3:08 pm