Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for English

The Docker container for Weblate got several improvements in past days and if you're using it, it might be worth reviewing your setup.

It has been upgraded to Python 3 and Django 2. This should cause no problems as Weblate itself supports both for quite some time, but if you were extending Weblate somehow, you might have to update these extensions to make them compatible.

The default cache backend is now redis. It will be required in future for some features, so you will have to switch at some point anyway. The memcached support is still there in case you want to stick with current setup.

Cron jobs have been integrated into the main container. So you no longer need to trigger them externally. This save quite some pain with offloaded indexing and another features which rely on regular execution.

Another important change is in logging - all logs are now go to the standard output, so you will get them by docker-compose logs and other Docker management commands. This will make debugging easier.

Hosted Weblate provides also free hosting for free software projects. The hosting requests queue has grown too long and waited for more than month, so it's time to process it and include new projects. I hope that gives you have good motivation to spend Christmas break by translating free software.

This time, the newly hosted projects include:

• ASS Danmaku - firefox extension for downloading danmaku
• KeePass DX - KeePass implementation for Android
• Liberapay Everywhere - the official Liberapay browser extension
• Offline QR Code Generator - browser add-on allowing you to quickly generate a QR code
• Guake - drop-down terminal for GNOME
• Planner - Project and Task manager designed for elementary OS
• EasySSH - The SSH connection manager to make your life easier.
• Misskey - A Twitter-like SNS
• Starke Verben - Android Application to learn your strong verbs
• FMIT - Free Music Instrument Tuner
• Crappy Firetitle - A firefox extension allowing customisation of windows' title
• Piano Booster - a MIDI file player that displays the musical notes AND teaches you how to play the piano

If you want to support this effort, please donate to Weblate, especially recurring donations are welcome to make this service alive. You can do that easily on Liberapay or Bountysource.

Next release on Weblate roadmap is called 3.0 and will bring some important changes. Some of these are already present in the Git repository and deployed on Hosted Weblate, but more of that will follow.

Component discovery

Component discovery is useful feature if you have several translation components in one repository. Previously import_project management command was the only way to help you, however it had to be executed manually on any change. Now you can use Component discovery addon which does quite similar thing, however is triggered on VCS update, so it can be used to follow structure of your project without any manual interaction. This feature is already available in Git and on Hosted Weblate, though you have to ask for initial setup there.

Code cleanups

Over the years (first Weblate release was more than six years ago) the code structure is far from optimal. There are several code cleanups scheduled and some of them are already present in Git repository. This will make Weblate easier to maintain and extend (eg. with third party file format drivers).

User management

Since the beginning Weblate has relied on user management and permissions as provided by Django. This is really not a good fit for language / project matrix permissions which most people need so we've come with Group ACL to extend this. This worked quite well for some use cases, but it turned out to be problematic for others. It is also quite hard to setup properly. For Weblate 3.0 this will be dropped and replaced by access control which fits more use cases. This is still being finalized in our issue tracker, so if you have any comments to this, please share them.

Migration path

Due to above mentioned massive changes, migrations across 3.0 will not be supported. You will always have to upgrade to 3.0 first and then upgrade to further versions. The code cleanups will also lead to some changes in the configuration, so take care when upgrading and follow upgrading instructions.

Hosted Weblate provides also free hosting for free software projects. The hosting requests queue has grown too long and waited for more than month, so it's time to process it and include new projects. I hope that gives you have good motivation to spend Christmas break by translating free software.

This time, the newly hosted projects include:

• OCCRP Investigative Dashboard - Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project
• Tachiyomi - manga reader for Android
• Sozi - a zooming presentation editor and player
• SoundSwitch - application to switch default playing device on Windows
• Project Hamster - a time tracking application
• Fragments - a GTK3 BitTorrent client
• Quack - Qualitative and Usable Aur paCKage helper
• RMS: Personal Data Safe - an article from Richard Stallman

If you want to support this effort, please donate to Weblate, especially recurring donations are welcome to make this service alive. You can do that easily on Liberapay or Bountysource.

Weblate 2.20 has been released today. There are several performance improvements, new features and bug fixes.

Full list of changes:

• Improved speed of cloning subversion repositories.
• Changed repository locking to use third party library.
• Added support for downloading only strings needing action.
• Added support for searching in several languages at once.
• New addon to configure Gettext output wrapping.
• New addon to configure JSON formatting.
• Added support for authentication in API using RFC 6750 compatible Bearer authentication.
• Added support for automatic translation using machine translation services.
• Added support for HTML markup in whiteboard messages.
• Added support for mass changing state of strings.
• Translate-toolkit at least 2.3.0 is now required, older versions are no longer supported.
• Added built in translation memory.
• Added componentlists overview to dashboard and per component list overview pages.
• Added support for DeepL machine translation service.
• Machine translation results are now cached inside Weblate.
• Added support for reordering commited changes.

If you are upgrading from older version, please follow our upgrading instructions.

You can find more information about Weblate on https://weblate.org, the code is hosted on Github. If you are curious how it looks, you can try it out on demo server. Weblate is also being used on https://hosted.weblate.org/ as official translating service for phpMyAdmin, OsmAnd, Turris, FreedomBox, Weblate itself and many other projects.

Should you be looking for hosting of translations for your project, I'm happy to host them for you or help with setting it up on your infrastructure.

Further development of Weblate would not be possible without people providing donations, thanks to everybody who have helped so far! The roadmap for next release is just being prepared, you can influence this by expressing support for individual issues either by comments or by providing bounty for them.

Last week was pretty quiet. The most interesting part was licensing issue with two factor authentication library we use. In the end the library was relicensed to MIT, what makes it compatible with pretty much anything.

I've spent some time on the Debian packages as well, I'm getting closer to make them work again, but there are still some issues to overcome.

Handled issues:

• #14074 Replace google2fa library
• #14046 Restore SQL query after session expire

Last week was a bit quiet, I've spend some time on our infrastructure and doing reviews. There is still big pending task to update Debian packages and I will hopefully get to it this week.

Handled issues:

• #14065 Can not connect to remote server without manual modification in codebase
• #61 Add CAA DNS Record for PMA websites when possible
• #179 Documentation improvements

Last week I've continued on reviewing incoming pull requests and issues without coding much myself. It seems that amount of incoming issues is still quite big.

Handled issues:

• #14005 Supported versions
• #14048 Fixes adding new column in query builder, #14047
• #13940 arg_separator breaks PMA: Call to a member function getCurrentUserAndHost
• #13927 NEED HELP PHPMyAdmin compatibility with PHP 7.1
• #13984 Unable to logout of phpMyAdmin-4.6.6-5 on Ubuntu
• #14003 Issue saving design
• #14047 Add column button in query builder doesn't work
• #14032 Warning in ./libraries/sql.lib.php#601
• #14034 Designer add table
• #14035 Fix Broken Designer Add Table
• #13887 4.7.7: PHP Warning: Unknown: Input variables exceeded 1000. To increase the limit change max_input_vars in php.ini.

Last week was mostly spent on reviewing pull requests. There is quite a lot them coming in and I always feel bad when we're not able to review incoming code in timely manner, but unfortunately it happens time to time.

Handled issues:

• #13892 Fix charset error when creating/editing routines; bug #13889
• #14036 Fix broken sort
• #14006 Translated using Weblate (Filipino)
• #13964 Warning: hash_equals(): Expected known_string to be a string, null given
• #14021 fix maintenance operations
• #14022 Max height not set for console
• #14024 Set console max height, issue #14022
• #13889 Create/Edit routine charset bug
• #150 Security release 4.7.8 missing on docker hub

Weblate 2.19.1 has been released today. This is bugfix only release mostly to fix problematic migration from 2.18 which some users have observed.

Full list of changes:

• Fixed migration issue on upgrade from 2.18.
• Improved file upload API validation.

If you are upgrading from older version, please follow our upgrading instructions.

You can find more information about Weblate on https://weblate.org, the code is hosted on Github. If you are curious how it looks, you can try it out on demo server. Weblate is also being used on https://hosted.weblate.org/ as official translating service for phpMyAdmin, OsmAnd, Turris, FreedomBox, Weblate itself and many other projects.

Should you be looking for hosting of translations for your project, I'm happy to host them for you or help with setting it up on your infrastructure.

Further development of Weblate would not be possible without people providing donations, thanks to everybody who have helped so far! The roadmap for next release is just being prepared, you can influence this by expressing support for individual issues either by comments or by providing bounty for them.