Open Stack

Am 2019-04-08 09:13, schrieb Ian Wienand:
> On Tue, Apr 02, 2019 at 12:28:31PM +0200, Frank Kloeker wrote:
>> The OpenStack I18n team was aware about the fact, that we will run 
>> into an
>> unsupported platform in the near future and started an investigation 
>> about
>> the renew of translation platform on [1].
>> [1] 
>> https://blueprints.launchpad.net/openstack-i18n/+spec/renew-translation-platform
> 
> I took an action item to do some investigation in the infra meeting.
> From the notes above, for last iteration it looks like it came down to
> Zanata v Poodle.  However when I look at [1] Poodle doesn't look
> terribly active.
> 
> It looks like Fedora haven't made any choices around which way to
> go, but weblate has been suggested [2].
> 
> Looking at weblate, it seems to have a few things going for it from
> the infra point of view
> 
> * it seems active
> * it's a python/django app which fits our deployments and general
>   skills better than java
> * has a docker project [3] so has interest in containerisation
> * we currently put translations in, and propose them via jobs
>   triggered periodically using the zanata CLI tool as described at
>   [4].  weblate has a command-line client that looks to me like it can
>   do roughly what we do now [5] ... essentially integrate with jobs to
>   upload new translations into the tool, and extract the translations
>   and put them into gerrit.
> * That said, it also seems we could integrate with it more "directly"
>   [6]; it seems it can trigger imports of translations from git repos
>   via webhooks (focused on github, but we could do similar with a post
>   job) and also propose updates directly to gerrit (using git-review;
>   documentation is light on this feature but it is there).  It looks
>   like (if I'm reading it right) we could move all configuration in a
>   .weblate file per-repo, which suits our distributed model.


Hi Ian,

thanks for taking a first look on Weblate. It looks also interesting to 
me. I tried a first test installation and there are also some advantages 
from I18n perspective:
* automatic syntax check on translation strings [1]. In the past we had 
often format errors on Python strings, which are not easy to spot. Also 
when we started with hard syntax check on sphinx-build few weeks ago, it 
seems that we can cover such kind of errors in Weblate UI
* Machine Translating backends [2]. It's not a shame to use Google 
Translate instead a paper dictionary. I think it's usual in most of the 
translation teams. Zanata started to develop such kind of stuff, which 
is in Weblate already included. Most of the MT services are paid 
service. I would try to get in touch with Deepl (a German company) to 
sponsor us. Or there is also a way to implement our own MT service, if 
there is a OpenStack project or SIG, which is looking for a senseful use 
case in AI.

Weblate holds his own VCS and commits each translation into the local 
repo. Sync with upstream can be automtically or by hand with wlc client. 
I saw also Gerrit backend, without any further documentation.

I think it's a lots of work. First step would be write down all that 
workflows and use cases what we need for a migration.

> The other thing is, I noticed that weblate has hosted options.  If the
> CI integration is such that it's importing via webhooks, and proposing
> reviews then it seems like this is essentially an unprivileged app.
> We have sunk a lot of collective time and resources into Zanata
> deployment and we should probably do a real cost-benefit analysis once
> we have some more insights.

Following the prize table on [3] we're far away from the Enterprise 
account with only 20 repos. Self-hosting and installation of the plain 
app is not a big deal, I think. Most of the work will be setup projects 
and sync translations in and out. On the other hand that could be easier 
with technics what you mentioned.

Frank


[1] 
https://docs.weblate.org/en/weblate-3.5.1/user/checks.html#check-python-format
[2] https://docs.weblate.org/en/latest/admin/machine.html
[3] https://weblate.org/en/hosting/