KDE neon Translations

One of the best things about making software collaboratively is the translations.  Sure I could make a UML diagramming tool or whatever all by my own but it’s better if I let lots of other people help out and one of the best crowd-sourcing features of open community development is you get translated into many popular and obscure languages which it would cost a fortune to pay some company to do.

When KDE was monolithic is shipping translation files in separate kde-l10n tars so users would only have to install the tar for their languages and not waste disk space on all the other languages.  This didn’t work great because it’s faffy for people to work out they need to install it and it doesn’t help with all the other software on their system.  In Ubuntu we did something similar where we extracted all the translations and put them into translation packages, doing it at the distro level makes more sense than at the collection-of-things-that-KDE-ships level but still has problems when you install updated software.  So KDE has been moving to just shipping the translations along with the individual application or library which makes sense and it’s not like the disk space from the unused languages is excessive.

So when KDE neon came along we had translations for KDE frameworks and KDE Plasma straight away because those are included in the tars.  But KDE Applications still made kde-l10n tars which are separate and we quietly ignored them in the hope something better would come along, which pleasingly it now has.  KDE Applications 17.04 now ships translations in the tars for stuff which uses Frameworks 5 (i.e. the stuff we care about in neon). So KDE neon User Editions now include translations for KDE Applications too.  Not only that but Harald has done his genius and turned the releaseme tool into a library so KDE neon’s builder can use it to extract the same translation files into the developer edition packages so translators can easily try out the Git master versions of apps to see what translations look missing or broken.  There’s even an x-test language which makes xxTextxx strings so app developers can use it to check if any strings are untranslated in their applications.

The old kde-l10n packages in the Ubuntu archive would have some file clashes with the in-tar translations which would often break installs in non-English languages (I got complaints about this but not too many which makes me wonder if KDE neon attracts the sort of person who just uses their computer in English).  So I’ve built dummy empty kde-l10n packages so you can now install these without clashing files.

Still plenty to do.  docs aren’t in the Developer Edition builds.  And System Settings needs some code to make a UI for installing locales and languages of the base system, currently that needs done by hand if it’s not done at install time  (apt install language-pack-es).  But at last another important part of KDE’s software is now handled directly by KDE rather than hoping a third party will do the right thing and trying them out is pleasingly trivial.