Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for SUSE

wlc 0.4, a command line utility for Weblate, has been just released. This release doesn't bring much changes, but still worth announcing.

The most important change is that development repository has been moved under WeblateOrg organization at GitHub, you can now find it at https://github.com/WeblateOrg/wlc. Another important news is that Debian package is currently waiting in NEW queue and will hopefully soon hit unstable.

wlc is built on API introduced in Weblate 2.6 and still being in development. Several commands from wlc will not work properly if executed against Weblate 2.6, first fully supported version will be 2.7 (current git is okay as well, it is now running on both demo and hosting servers). You can usage examples in the wlc documentation.

wlc 0.3, a command line utility for Weblate, has been just released. This is probably first release which is worth using so it's probably also worth of bigger announcement.

It is built on API introduced in Weblate 2.6 and still being in development. Several commands from wlc will not work properly if executed against Weblate 2.6, first fully supported version will be 2.7 (current git is okay as well, it is now running on both demo and hosting servers).

How to use it? First you will probably want to store the credentials, so that your requests are authenticated (you can do unauthenticated requests as well, but obviously only read only and on public objects), so lets create ~/.config/weblate:

[weblate]
url = https://hosted.weblate.org/api/

[keys]
https://hosted.weblate.org/api/ = APIKEY

Now you can do basic commands:

$ wlc show weblate/master/cs
...
last_author: Michal Čihař
last_change: 2016-05-13T15:59:25
revision: 62f038bb0bfe360494fb8dee30fd9d34133a8663
share_url: https://hosted.weblate.org/engage/weblate/cs/
total: 1361
total_words: 6144
translate_url: https://hosted.weblate.org/translate/weblate/master/cs/
translated: 1361
translated_percent: 100.0
translated_words: 6144
url: https://hosted.weblate.org/api/translations/weblate/master/cs/
web_url: https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/weblate/master/cs/

You can find more examples in wlc documentation.

Today it's fifteen years from my first contribution to free software. I've changed several jobs since that time, all of them involved quite a lot of free software and now I'm fully working on free software.

The first contribution happened to be on phpMyAdmin and did consist of Czech translation:

Subject: Updated Czech translation of phpMyAdmin
From: Michal Cihar <cihar@email.cz>
To: swix@users.sourceforge.net
Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 11:23:36 +0200
X-Mailer: KMail [version 1.2]

Hi

I've updated (translated few added messages) Czech translation of phpMyAdmin. 
I send it to you in two encodings, because I thing that in distribution 
should be included version in ISO-8859-2 which is more standard than Windows 
1250.

Regards
    Michal Cihar

Many other contributions came afterwards, several projects died on the way, but it has been a great ride so far. To see some of these you can look at my software page which contains both current and past projects and also includes later opensourced tools I've created earlier (mostly for Windows).

These days you can find me being active on phpMyAdmin, Gammu, python-gammu and Wammu, Debian and Weblate.

Going back to faster release cycle, Weblate 2.6 has been just released. There is improved support for Python 3 or brand new HTTP REST API.

Full list of changes for 2.6:

• Fixed validation of subprojects with language filter.
• Improved support for XLIFF files.
• Fixed machine translation for non English sources.
• Added REST API.
• Django 1.10 compatibility.
• Added categories to whiteboard messages.

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. You can login there with demo account using demo password or register your own user. Weblate is also being used https://hosted.weblate.org/ as official translating service for phpMyAdmin, OsmAnd, Aptoide, 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.

The long requested feature for Weblate is here - it now has API which you can use to control it. It's scope is currently limited, but it will expand in future releases. The API is currently available in Git, deployed on both Demo server and Hosted Weblate, our hosted solution. It will be also part of 2.6 release, which should be released by end of April.

Anyway the API now provides basic operations up to translation level - you can not edit individual translations, handle suggestions or other advanced features. However what you can do includes:

• Manipulating with the underlaying VCS repository (commit, push, pull, reset)
• Download or upload translation files
• Get information about translations, components, projects and languages
• Lock or unlock components for translation

As you can see this really covers the basic operations which were most frequently requested, more will come in future. You can see more detailed the Weblate API documentation.

It has become almost tradition for me, so yes, I'm attending FOSDEM 2016. It's probably the best conference in Europe to meet other free software guys and that was always motivation for me to come - to see people I meet on mailing lists for rest of the year.

This time it will be slightly different for me - I will be giving talk there for first time. Originally I wanted to do lightning talk only, but in the end I got persuaded and it's full length talk now. It will be in the Coding for Language Communities devroom and you might guess from the devroom topic that it will be about Weblate.

Last week the Software Freedom Conservancy has launched fundraiser to be able to continue operation under new circumstances, where some sponsors left them after GPL enforcement activities.

I think Conservancy does quite a lot for free software ecosystem and GPL enforcement is something what has to be done, if we want to protect free software world. That's reason, why I've decided to become their supporter:

It has been seven years since I've joined SUSE (for second time, but that's different story). As everything has to come to the end, I've decided to make a change in my life and leave safety net of being employed and go for new experience with freelancer life.

This will give me more time to spend on free software projects where I'm involved. Of course I need to earn some money to live, so many decisions about where to spend my time will be backed by money...

First of all I will work on phpMyAdmin, where I was chosen as a contractor (of two for this year). This will be half time job for me and you will see weekly reports in my blog, similar to what Madhura is doing.

Second priority will be Weblate, especially the hosting solution. I believe that this is something what can work quite well in the long term, but the tool needs some development to make it as great as I would like to have it. If you want me to extend hosting for free software projects, you can do it by money :-).

And nobody knows what projects come next. There is some work to be done on Gammu and Wammu, but given that I don't have any recent device to use it, it's sometimes hard to fix the bugs there. Of course this can change if I get some money to work on that.

PS: It's not that SUSE would be bad place to work. It's actually pretty great if you're looking for work with free software. You work there on free software, with great people and you get quite some freedom. As bonus once or twice in a year, there is Hackweek which you can spend on anything. And of course they have lot of open positions :-).

The python-suseapi 0.22 has been released last week. The version number shows nothing special, but one important change has happened - the development repository has been moved.

It's now under openSUSE project on GitHub, what makes it easier to find for potential users and also makes team maintenance a bit easier than under my personal account.

If you're curious what the module does - it's mostly usable only inside SUSE, providing access to some internal services. One major thing usable outside is the Bugzilla interface, which should be at one day replaced by python-bugzilla, but for now provides some features not available there (using web scraping).

Anyway the code has documentation on readhtedocs.org, so you can figure out yourself what it includes.

Weblate 2.4 has been released today. It comes with extended support for various file formats, extended hook scripts, better keyboard shortcuts and dozen of bug fixes.

Full list of changes for 2.4:

• Improved support for PHP files.
• Ability to add ACL to anonymous user.
• Improved configurability of import_project command.
• Added CSV dump of history.
• Avoid copy/paste errors with whitespace chars.
• Added support for Bitbucket webhooks.
• Tigher control on fuzzy strings on translation upload.
• Several URLs have changed, you might have to update your bookmarks.
• Hook scripts are executed with VCS root as current directory.
• Hook scripts are executed with environment variables descriping current component.
• Add management command to optimize fulltext index.
• Added support for error reporting to Rollbar.
• Projects now can have multiple owners.
• Project owners can manage themselves.
• Added support for javascript-format used in Gettext PO.
• Support for adding new translations in XLIFF.
• Improved file format autodetection.
• Extended keyboard shortcuts.
• Improved dictionary matching for several languages.
• Improved layout of most of pages.
• Support for adding words to dictionary while translating.
• Added support for filtering languages to be managed by Weblate.
• Added support for translating and importing CSV files.
• Rewritten handling of static files.
• Direct login/registration links to third party service if that's the only one.
• Commit pending changes on account removal.
• Add management command to change site name.
• Add option to confiugure default committer.
• Add hook after adding new translation.
• Add option to specify multiple files to add to commit.

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

You can find more information about Weblate on http://weblate.org, the code is hosted on Github. If you are curious how it looks, you can try it out on demo server. You can login there with demo account using demo password or register your own user.

Weblate is also being used https://hosted.weblate.org/ as official translating service for phpMyAdmin, Gammu, Weblate itself and other projects.

If you are free software project which would like to use Weblate, I'm happy to help you with set up or even host Weblate for you.

Further development of Weblate would not be possible without people providing donations, thanks to everybody who have helped so far!

PS: 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.