Eclipse Babel Project Meeting: 3/31/08
Attendees:

• Chris Nguyen
• Kit Lo
• Pascal Essiembre
• Margaret Wong
• Daniel McGowan
• Gabe O’Brien
• Pat Huff
• Denis Roy
• Nigel Westbury

• Adobe Meeting
• Went very well
• Quality of translations is a concern
• Once Adobe gets the 3.4 files they’ll be able to see how they’re doing
• Denis zipped up the files for 3.3
• Once 3.4 is tagged as a release, we’ll have to figure out another way
• EclipseCon Working Session Topics
• Large donations to Babel – How should we handle those?
• Current process: People attached donations to bugzilla
• Contributions are automatically under EPL
• When they are large contributions, they are given to legal
• Works pretty well, we may just have to document this
• ACTION ITEM: Denis to document the process to avoid business outage and scalability issues
• Legalities
• Should we include a translation form with each contribution?
• We don’t need to worry about this
• Quality of Translated Code
• Goal: We have to have committers eventually verify the translations
• Options:
• Perhaps have a status level for committers to verify code (i.e. eBay)
• Voting?
• Change sets – showing people what has changed, verify
• How do we mark incorrect Translations?
• Suggestion – Pseudo Translation: Special tagging unique strings that are incorrect using index numbers
• Until we build up the community, it will be very hard to create a system to check the quality of code
• We should first start with voting – very long term
• ACTION ITEMS: include or recruit people to implement
• Chris and Kit to talk offline to recruit people from Google Summer of Code – Google pays students/people. We need to submit a very articulate document to request a project
• Denis and Gabe volunteer to be mentors
• Translating the same strings for each language at one time
• Denis submitted a patch for this
• Gabe looked at it and it looks good
• Promote the project individually – How? – STANDING ITEM
• Denis has been blogging about this
• PlanetEcilpse.org
• Link it to meeting minutes
• Open Source Convention in Asia
• Might not happen – very doubtful
• Eclipse Summit Europe – November
• Get Ralph to blog about us
• Chinese User Groups
• PHP Code Contribution – we need contributors
• We need to get more people into the project
• EclipseCon BOF Topics
• Translation Server
• How can a contributor tell whether or not the translation string is applicable for all versions of Eclipse when translating?
• We need to think of a better UI to answer this question
• How does a user download and install a new language pack by individual project?
• Bug open for this for Web API’s
• Motion: Get projects to build their own language packs
• Project language packs should be their own responsibility
• We have to spread the news to tell them to do this on their own
• Enable Web API -  people could consume the dump and build their own language pack – move up in priority – maybe a do a read only for now?
• Nigel opened this bug already
• Quality Control
• RSS feed – you can find out what happened to your language
• ACTION ITEM: Kit to open up a bug for this
• Dictionary of words that have already been translated by other people. This will create a sense of consistency
• Wikipedia.org system
• ACTION ITEM: Denis to add links to translation tool, to go to mailing list to discuss there.
• Talk to Localization Groups (from Eclipse Foundation)
• Eclipse foundation started this group
• ACTION ITEM: Kit to search for regional communities within the wiki and mailing lists – get in touch with these communities and promote Babel
• Runtime Editor
• Where do the translation strings go?
• Internet Issue
• Nigel may have opened up a bug to have a better UI to extract the translations in the file – Kit to remind him.
• Message Editor – RESUME HERE NEXT WEEK – 4/7/08
• The key being translated doesn’t show the context of each key
• This makes it hard to actually do the translation
• We need some type of UI to traces the key back to the code or give information on that particular string
• Incentives for people to join
• Strings not to be translated
• Create a UI to show which strings not to translate
• Should bring up a wizard to externalize the string
• Helps you figure out which ones being with a %
• Add Notification to show which strings that were already translated have been changed
• Eclipse Google Summer of Code