Please review po-imports

The files seem to have been approved and imported already. If a human approved them (it wasn't Danilo or myself), then the problem was probably that a leading slash was accidentally introduced in the paths inside your tarball; a fix for that is already in for the 2.2.2 rollout.

Alternatively, something may have been holding up the approver. We do have an approach for speeding it up, but no time to pursue it. We are working towards letting people do part of the approval work themselves, but that will take longer because it involves more far-reaching changes.

I did the approval. Can't tell you, Jeroen, if you are not on IRC :-P

The import approval is done by an auto-approval script that tries to match the uploaded po file to the right template and language. If it can do so, your uploads are approved rather quickly. Otherwise they have to be approved manually (if possible) by one of us.

If you are uploading a single po file to a specific language, you are giving all the information at upload time and the auto-approval can approve it straight away. If you are uploading a tarball to the product series, the script has to be able to deduct this information from the file names and path. It gets more complicated if there is more than one template to choose from, as is in your case. So the naming of the files in the tarball is crucial.

The script does not split file names but it looks at their path. A po file is matched with a template that is in the same subdirectory as the po file. The po files themselves should just be named according to the language code (e.g. de.po). So a good structure in your case would be:

merkaartor/merkaartor.pot
merkaartor/de.po
merkaartor/es.po
templates/templates.pot
templates/de.po
templates/es.po

Next time you upload, you should put the files for each template (including subdirectory!) in two different tarballs and upload each directly to the respective template:
https://translations.launchpad.net/merkaartor/trunk/+pots/merkaartor/+upload
https://translations.launchpad.net/merkaartor/trunk/+pots/templates/+upload

This way the file path is corrected in each template. After that, you can just put all files into one tarball and upload that directly to the series:
https://translations.launchpad.net/merkaartor/trunk/+translations-upload

This will all work without any intervention from us.

I will create an FAQ about this.

Henning Eggers suggests this article as an answer to your question:
FAQ #374: “Why are my translation imports taking so long to be approved?”.

On Thu, 19 Feb 2009, Henning Eggers wrote:

> The script does not split file names but it looks at their path. A po
> file is matched with a template that is in the same subdirectory as the
> po file. The po files themselves should just be named according to the
> language code (e.g. de.po). So a good structure in your case would be:
>
> merkaartor/merkaartor.pot
> merkaartor/de.po
> merkaartor/es.po
> templates/templates.pot
> templates/de.po
> templates/es.po
>
> Next time you upload, you should put the files for each template (including subdirectory!) in two different tarballs and upload each directly to the respective template:
> https://translations.launchpad.net/merkaartor/trunk/+pots/merkaartor/+upload
> https://translations.launchpad.net/merkaartor/trunk/+pots/templates/+upload
>
> This way the file path is corrected in each template. After that, you can just put all files into one tarball and upload that directly to the series:
> https://translations.launchpad.net/merkaartor/trunk/+translations-upload
>
> This will all work without any intervention from us.

Well, now I did as you suggested and it worked fine once. But again I'm
waiting two days for import of new template files and nothing happened.
Now the situation is also that the translations for strings in the new
.pot files are through, but the templates are not. This is not really fine.

Especially in a pre-release phase Launchpad seems to be unusable for
translations because of this. Shortly before a release you need to sync
upstream and Launchpad in short time spans to allow testing of
translations. When the syncing does not work there is a big problem with
the whole system. For JOSM we do not have releases, so this was not an
issue, but for merkaartor these long review times are really a bigger
problem.

Ciao
--
http://www.dstoecker.eu/ (PGP key available)

The only reason I can think of that kept your templates from being approved automatically is, that you did not upload them "directly to the template". Please tell me if you did that, so I can know what went wrong.

I approved the entries now and they should get imported soon. We are trying to get rid of most of the manual reviews so that these things take longer. I am sorry if this caused you trouble.

Henning

Obviuosly I meant "don't take so long" ...

On Fri, 27 Feb 2009, Henning Eggers wrote:

> Henning Eggers proposed the following answer:
> The only reason I can think of that kept your templates from being
> approved automatically is, that you did not upload them "directly to the
> template". Please tell me if you did that, so I can know what went
> wrong.

Actually I did what you told. First step upload two tar files directly
into template and second step create one tar-file and upload to main
project. The tar is constructed as your description says. As said, this
worked once and for the second try about a week later it stalled again.

Now the stuff is imported, but there is still a problem:
Strings 99 and 100 have a > included, whereas the template already has
a > instead for two weeks. This change does not come through to Launchpad.

Ciao
--
http://www.dstoecker.eu/ (PGP key available)

Haven't gone through this entire discussion (no time), but found the problem with the auto-approvals: the templates in the database were not in a subdirectory, but the newly uploaded ones were. And because the paths were different, the auto-approver did not feel it was safe to assume that the uploads were for the same templates that it already had in the database.