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Translation and keyboard in Anaconda test day
30/08/10
In a united effort from the i18n and l10n teams we are going to host a test day regarding translations and keyboard support in Anaconda. We are accepting feedback from users and contributors around the globe. It would be nice to receive tips from people using different keyboards layouts from a variety of languages. This kind of test is tricky because of the diversity involved in internationalization and keyboard support. That’s why we need help from everyone who can test or even just telling us what you think it is important or worth testing.
There are some test cases I’m willing to improve for a better test coverage. If there is something else you think we might cover please let me know. I intend to add a few more steps for post install in order to test if Anaconda did its job correctly. You can also collaborate with ideas using our Track ticket.
New directions
02/08/10
It has been an interesting time for me as a Fedora Ambassador. In the past few years I worked pretty much locally in events such FISL and Latinoware and also focusing my efforts on the coordination of the Brazilian Portuguese Translation Team, what gave me the opportunity to learn a lot about the community. Curiously, this year has been particularly different, not only due to the fact that I left the coordination to work on localization and internationalization quality assurance but also that I have been working closer to international ambassadors. Unfortunately, Rodrigo Padula left most of his activities as an ambassador to work on another projects. He was the only Brazilian ambassador working closer to the international ambassadors community and that left a communication hole with ambassadors around the globe, specially the ones from Latin America.
We realized that having just one person responsible for this communication is not enough because when he or she leaves it became harder to put things back on place. So we decided that anyone who is wiling to work on this will be welcome in order to avoid lack of communication in the future. I really don’t think that in LATAM language differences are a barrier for anything, but there is a clear issue of scalability. For instance, the Brazilian and the Chilean community are particularly big and need someone to help communicating with other countries. Fortunately, me and other guys are stepping up and participating more in the international ambassadors mailing list, in the LATAM mailing list and IRC channels. Participating in FUDCon Santiago was a great way of improving this relation for me. Chile is growing an interesting open source community that I was able to get closer and understand better.
My role on Fedora Project changed when I left the coordination of the translation team to work on localization and internationalization QA and I’m glad that it is changing even more. I am happy to find new ways of working for our community. We built a strong and vibrant community in Brazil in the past years and must keep improving the way we organize ourselves.
FUDCon Santiago: Day #3
20/07/10
I know this is coming a lot late but we had some problems with the Internet at the hotel in Santiago. Anyway, the last day of FUDCon had interesting talks by Toshio Kuratomi and Domingo Becker, two of our rock stars, as Toshio himself likes to say.
I gave a talk about how internationalization works and how we can make it better on Fedora. I tried to explain it from the developer level until the user level. Some guys got surprised by the huge amount of work it takes to internationalize and localize a piece of software.
At the closing talk everyone watched to a thrilling speech of the new Fedora Project Leader, Jared Smith. After that we took a lot of pictures and celebrated one more FUDCon in Latin America!
Muchas Gracias Chile!
FUDCon Santiago: Day #2
20/07/10
The day started with three interesting talks: “Joining Fedora Infrastructure” by Dennis Gilmore, “Monkey, the next generation Web Server” by Eduardo Silva and “RPM packaging lessons” by Gomix and Daniel Bruno.
After all talks we got together to discuss Fedora organization in Latin America. Although it was a bit messy and noisy that was a good opportunity to clarify the needs of the region and define some points we should work on. They include trying to prepare the FUDCon LATAM earlier and also trying to do a BarCamp in the next one and see how it goes with the Latin America audience.
FUDCon Santiago: Day #1
15/07/10
We got FUDCon started today here in Chile after a lot of months of hard work. The cold weather (at least for Brazilians) didn’t prevent us from have a nice time. Today we already had a lot of talks about all kind of subjects like GNOME 3, LATAM infrastructure, Inkscape and many more.
My first talk was about Fedora’s spins and remixes. I have never talked Spanish for that long and it has been a good opportunity to practice. I guess the audience got it right and I was able to reply the questions properly. You might want to take a look at the slides if you are able to read in Spanish. Also, it was great to meet the new Fedora Project Leader, Jared Smith.
Opening talk by Jared
Tomorrow Dennis Gilmore will give a talk about how to join Fedora Infrastructure and Daniel and Guillermo will talk about RPM packaging. Those are just the first talks, we will have a lot more! Give a look at the event wiki page for further information.
Gracias!
FUDCon: Fedora’s World Cup
07/07/10
The World Cup isn’t over yet, but since Brazil is already out I expect Spain to be the champion. Random guesses apart, while the most important soccer tournament is still happening in South Africa I’m preparing myself for another event that will take place in Santiago, Chile. Next week the Fedora Project will be hosting the second Fedora Users and Developers Conference in Latin America. The first one took place in Porto Alegre, Brazil last year and I was there too.
This year we will have the presence of the new Fedora Project Leader, Jared Smith, and also interesting sessions from Toshio Kuratomi, Dennis Gilmore, Daniel Bruno. Jayme Ayres, Rodrigo Padula, Domingo Becker and many more folks from Fedora.
I will be holding a technical session about spins and remixes in Fedora, and also a hackfest regarding internationalization and localization quality assurance. It will be a good opportunity to meet some friends I haven’t seen for a while and also a great opportunity to create something good for Fedora. This is our own World Cup and Open Source is the big winner.
FUDCon Santiago complete schedule: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:LATAM_2010
Playing with gettext and intltool
26/01/10
I have been learning how to use gettext and intltool in order to get some code internationalized. At first I thought it would very difficult to learn and get practical results but in fact the i18n libraries and tools are easy to work with.
The first choice was how to test them in a useful way and so I chose to do it using the Preupgrade code. Although I’m not very familiar with Python code I did this because this software is not internationalized yet and because it is “real code”, not just a Hello World example. I guess this is the greatest thing about open source software, you can just dig in and do whatever you want to and give it back, so IMHO this is a good place to start and a patch can come later. Another interesting thing about gettext is that it works pretty much in the same way for other languages. This is good because I intent to collaborate providing i18n support for other programs as well.
Preupgrade speaking some Brazilian Portuguese
So far I extracted 80 strings into the .POT file but I was not able to get the dialog titles internationalized yet, although they are marked as translatable in the Glade XML file. Once I fix this it will be good to go and I’ll find out how to get the i18n support automatically built into the package.
What I expect to do for Fedora in 2010
30/12/09
Since I’m leaving the coordination of the Brazilian Portuguese translation team after four years of a rewarding job, I expect to do something different in the next years.
My main concern about the whole software translation system right now is that for many times the teams make a good work but for many reasons the translations don’t end in the final versions of Fedora. These reasons are for instance: strings freeze breaks, final freeze breaks, downstream patching and specific i18n bugs.
IMHO, at first we need to improve the testing on those situations, and this is where I intend to start helping. After that, I intent to propose some patches rather than just file tons of bugs. It is important to make the i18n string testing consistent during the release cycle, and the Fedora 13 release cycle seems a great time to start.
Happy New Year Folks!
