Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for Weblate

Weblate 1.6 is already two weeks out without any regressions, so now it's time to think about features for 1.7.

I definitely want to improve support for monolingual translation formats as they currently suffer by various metadata issues (eg. checks not working correctly). This requires quite big change in underlying database, but I think it's quite manageable.

When talking about checks, I want to make them configurable per project as global configuration is quite limiting for shared sites like hosted Weblate.

I will definitely need to touch registration and authentication, either by supporting latest django-registration API or to move some other solution with support for federated login. Which of these approaches will be used depends on my time, what is always the most limiting factor.

This might sound as too few features, but I'd like to make releases more often, so that should fit into this plan. However if you want to push for some feature, you still have two days to fund something on Catincan!

Finally, Weblate 1.6 is available as ready to use appliance in SUSE Studio.

This took quite long as openSUSE 12.3 does not work as expected inside SUSE Studio and I was too lazy to find all necessary tweaks earlier. The same problem actually prevented from Weblate 1.5 being there at all.

The biggest obstacle was MySQL setup - after enabling "Set up MySQL" in studio, you end up with MySQL database with empty mysql.users table, which obviously can not authenticate anybody. As I've found out, the only way around is manual setup.

Once this was figured out, the appliance only needed minor tweaking and is now ready to use in SUSE Gallery in all formats used for virtualization.

Weblate 1.6 has been released today. It comes with lot of improvements, especially adds voting for suggestions, improves import performance and brings more helpful admin interface. This is also first release with crowdfunded feature, but there are still some features to fund!

Full list of changes for 1.6:

• Nicer error handling on registration.
• Browsing of changes.
• Fixed sorting of machine translation suggestions.
• Improved support for MyMemory machine translation.
• Added support for Amagama machine translation.
• Various optimizations on frequently used pages.
• Highlights searched phrase in search results.
• Support for automatic fixups while saving the message.
• Tracking of translation history and option to revert it.
• Added support for Google Translate API.
• Added support for managing SSH host keys.
• Various form validation improvements.
• Various quality checks improvements.
• Performance improvements for import.
• Added support for voting on suggestions.
• Cleanup of admin interface.

You can find more information about Weblate on it's website, 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. Ready to run appliances will be soon available in SUSE Studio Gallery.

Weblate is also being used https://l10n.cihar.com/ as official translating service for phpMyAdmin, Gammu, Weblate itself and others.

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.

Yesterday, I've spent some time trying to improve speed of translation import in Weblate. It got annoyingly slow while adding new features and I felt there has to be some area for improvements even with all the features.

I was testing on development server with debug stuff enabled (what slows down things quite a lot already) and first import took about 30 seconds.

Quick look revealed that for linked repositories, the link lookup happens too often, so some caching could be used. This has saved about 3 seconds...

With offloaded indexing (what is anyway only useful setup for production use), every reindex request was checking whether there is already one before creating new one. In most cases there is none before, so it's simply faster to try to create one and ignore error in case it is already there. We're now 5 seconds faster.

Another big resource consumer are quality checks. They provide useful feedback to translators, but it means that quite a lot of code needs to be executed for every single string. First thing I've realized is that unit check state is recalculated everytime regardless the fact whether there was any change, what was easy to fix. The other speed issue is in consistency check - it does too complex SQL query, which usually does not match anything. Converting this to much simpler one (which will in most cases still have no results) improves performance for usual path while having minimal impact for the real checking. Another 4 seconds down on my test import.

Last thing which I changed is way how per translation statistics are updated. In past this required quite a lot of queries, but yesterday I've realized this can be much reduced. During test suite run on PostgreSQL, I saw that it's not that easy - PostgreSQL does not allow to sum boolean fields, but fortunately this can be fixed as well. This has saved about 2 seconds.

In the end the tested import took 16 seconds instead of original 30 and issued 2500 SQL queries instead of 5000 at the beginning. I hope you will enjoy regained speed of imports :-).

The first crowdfunded feature for Weblate is here - Voting for suggestions.

Once you enable this for your translation, you can vote for translation suggestions and once they reach defined number of votes, it will get accepted. You can however combine this with other Weblate features to achieve different setups, see our documentation for some other use cases.

This is also most likely last feature for Weblate 1.6, so you can expect release in next week or two in case no major problems appear.

PS: There are still some features to fund.

Weblate is now year and half old, has quite many users and almost all features I wanted it to have. Now it's time to push it further to fit also other projects.

Therefore I've decided to try crowdfunding on Catincan to see which of requested features are actually wanted most. Yes, you can vote with your money :-).

The first set of features to fund is:

• Federated login using Facebook, Google, GitHub etc.
• Source strings tracking to improve experience for developers with source strings changes or prioritization
• Voting for suggestions to better support larger translation teams

This is my first experiment with crowdfunding, so I'm looking forward to it's results.

Weblate 1.5 has been released today. It comes with lot of improvements, especially in performance, reporting and support for machine translations.

Full list of changes for 1.5:

• Please check manual for upgrade instructions.
• Added public user pages.
• Better naming of plural forms.
• Added support for TBX export of glossary.
• Added support for Bitbucket notifications.
• Activity charts are now available for each translation, language or user.
• Extended options of import_project admin command.
• Compatible with Django 1.5.
• Avatars are now shown using libravatar.
• Added possibility to pretty print JSON export.
• Various performance improvements.
• Indicate failing checks or fuzzy strings in progress bars for projects or languages as well.
• Added support for custom pre-commit hooks and commiting additional files.
• Rewritten search for better performance and user experience.
• New interface for machine translations.
• Added support for monolingual po files.
• Extend amount of cached metadata to improve speed of various searches.
• Now shows word counts as well.

You can find more information about Weblate on it's website, 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. Ready to run appliances will be soon available in SUSE Studio Gallery.

Weblate is also being used https://l10n.cihar.com/ as official translating service for phpMyAdmin, Gammu, Weblate itself and others.

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.

Hackweek 9 is over and it's time to share what I've done on Weblate during that.

I think everything went quite well and Weblate is now ready for 1.5 release. I'm slowly deploying it on my installations (unfortunately this release migration will need some noticeable downtime for bigger installations) and everything seems to work fine so far. I believe this is possible thanks to massive test coverage - all important code is covered by testcases.

So what you can expect in 1.5 release? The most visible change is probably new machine translation support, providing support for way more backends and allow you to plug in own services as well. The other changes include word counting (what might give you more idea how much work is remaining) or fancy progress bars in all places (they used to be available for translations only).

From the other side, Weblate can now run custom scripts to pre-process translations before commit, what can be used for various things from generating byte compiled files to sorting or cleaning up the translation files.

Also Weblate should be now much faster - there were dozen of optimizations done, leading to much lower press on database server.

If you want to see more detailed work progress, check Hackweek project page or Weblate changelog.

PS: In case no problems appear, Weblate 1.5 should be released on Sunday.

You might have already noticed that there is Hackweek 9 coming next week. At SUSE we will get pizzas, icecream and other nice stuff, but most importantly we can spend the week on hacking anything we want.

Same as last year, I want to spend most of my Hackweek on Weblate, nice crowdsourcing tool for translations. The major goal is to finish 1.5 release, what should not be that hard. The most challenging bits for new machine translation interface are already implemented, and the rest is pretty much only tweaking of existing code.

Another thing we want to explore is possibility of using Weblate for openSUSE translations. Currently they are mostly kept in SVN, what is blocker for using Weblate, but we will see what can be done there.

This night you might have noticed that some services like hosted Weblate or phpMyAdmin wiki being quite flaky.

It was caused by DDOS attack which pretty much busted firewall and thus made unable to open new connections. In the morning when I've realized this, I introduced another breakage by too strict filtering on firewall :-). However now everything should be back to normal.