Per language metainfo files

[razzeee]

Having looked at trying to get translation systems to handle appstream (again), I think it might make this way more approachable, if we could have multiple files.

For e.g. weblate asks you for a source file of your translations. And a filemask for all your available translation files.

https://docs.weblate.org/en/weblate-5.13.3/admin/projects.html#component-template
https://docs.weblate.org/en/weblate-5.13.3/admin/projects.html#component-filemask

It might be able to handle this differently, but having one huge file, seems not very maintainable.

A different approach would be:

1. to have some manual work, on each change with generating translations via itstool for e.g.
2. then have that run into weblate
3. weblate exports translations back to the repo
4. right now it would need another itstool run to merge the translations into a metainfo file again

example how step 1 could look like https://github.com/flathub/net.filebot.FileBot/pull/24/files

It would be handy to simplify this as much as possible - currently the rate of translations used for metadata is pretty bad on flathub. So e.g. getting rid of 4 would be nice.

If this already exitsts, I could not find it in the docs.

[ximion]

I don't really understand - what exactly do you have a problem with?
We can't split translations, that would break the world and all XML translation rules. Weblate works just fine with MetaInfo files, and if you use xgettext you get translation for free.

The MetaInfo Creator will spit out exactly the Meson snippets to use for translation, if you use Meson.

The only annoyance is indeed if release notes are merged in from elsewhere, because then the translation happens in two steps (and even extraction has to happen in two steps if you want translated release descriptions). Extending appstreamcli to execute these actions in one go would certainly be possible, but buildsystems do that just fine right now too...

AppStream itself uses Weblate to translate its MetaInfo file :-)

[razzeee]

None of the things I maintain use meson. At least not for the app.

Can you share the weblate config?

[JakobDev]

I have already implemented your approach in my workflow. I had written a script to create Gettext files for Weblate. The translations are then applied during the installation. This Workflow exists basically for all of my projects. It's a bit annoying, since I use Qt, so Gettext is only needed for Linux data files.

You should note that AppStream is not the only one with this problem. It also exists for other data files such as desktop entries or MimeTypes. So if you want to translate those data files, you need to setup Gettext nonetheless.

[razzeee]

The thing is, I think this will break all the time for a bigger repo. I don't like having a pipeline run a script and generating those files or somebody having to do that manually.

E.g. I want to do it for kodi https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/blob/master/tools/Linux/kodi.metainfo.xml.in
But I won't be pinged (or want to be) every time that file updates. Which would mean having a script kick off instead and then having that create/update the files and create a PR / commit them.

I would like weblate to be able to handle that step in the end, as it basically removes a whole step for everybody. So weblate is in a sense that script/pipeline and MR creation tool - but in addition it's also the translation tool.

[JakobDev]

This won't work as you expect. Weblate needs the file in a format that can be parsed. So even if we had one AppStream file for a language (e.g. org.example.App_en.metainfo.xml, org.example.App_de.metainfo.xml), Weblate would not know what to do with these files. This is a Issue that needs to be fixed by Weblate. There is already an Issue for this. For now you need to use the Gettext workaround.

[razzeee]

That could be the next step after this.

I've raised this some time ago
translate/translate#5261