Prose practice

I have been working on an integrated l10n infrastructure for Debian. Instead of starting from scratch, the Wordforge project was chosen to be used as the base. Currently Wordforge has a toolkit for various l10n operations as well as a web frontend Pootle that uses this toolkit. My job is to adapt these tools to Debian needs.

I see three major areas of my future work in Wordforge:

• scalability: importing all translations of all packages in Debian into Wordforge as it is would require a very powerful computer. I believe that a planned transition to a relational database as the backend of Wordforge (instead of plain old files) will help immensely here.
• frontends: there is only one frontend to the system, Pootle. Debian will need an e-mail interface, an XML-RPC interface, a Subversion interface and possibly others in addition to the web interface. This is more difficult than it sounds because Pootle is intertwined with the backend. Work is underway to define a clear API for the backend that could be used by various clients.
• process: Debian translators have strict translation review and ownership processes. These would have to be incorporated into Pootle.

A (to me almost distressingly) large amount of discussions took place on the debian-i18n and Wordforge mailing lists on these topics and more as I dug into Wordforge to better understand the current situtation and plans of other developers. After the initial communication peak, now things are really starting to roll. Here's what we have now:

• A general concensus for a move in Wordforge towards a relational database. This took quite a bit of convincing ;)
• Agreement on the ideas of a new backend API
• A sketch (in code) of the new API

I posted the sketch of the API to the Pootle mailing list. There was little opposition and mostly constructive remarks. Unless a disagreement pops up, I would expect the API design to be finished by next week.

My longer term plans:

• write an implementation for the new API (a week)
• cover the current file-based backend under the API (difficult to estimate)
• migrate Pootle to use the new backend (difficult to estimate)
• write a new frontend or two: e-mail, XML-RPC (a week)
• write a backend based on a relational database (a week)

One thing that is still keeping me down a is a couple of exams due in a week. After that I should have much more time to work on this project.

# posted by Gintautas Miliauskas @ 18:18