Michal Čihař - Archive for 2/2017

Weekly phpMyAdmin contributions 2017-W08

The amount of new issues reported for 4.7.0 seems to be going down, so there was some time left to review pull requests on master branch with new features. But there was fair amount of bug fixing as well.

We've also managed to release new version of SQL parser which brings support for LOAD DATA statements and other improvements.

Handled issues:

New free software projects on Hosted Weblate

Hosted Weblate provides also free hosting for free software projects. I'm quite slow in processing the hosting requests, but when I do that, I process them in a batch and add several projects at once.

This time, the newly hosted projects include:

  • DoubleContact - offline contact manager
  • LanguageTool - style and grammar checker for 25+ languages
  • Ghini - botanic collection manager
  • Converse.js - XMPP chat client in your browser
  • Pulse - IT Infrastructure Management Software
  • Turris - high performance and open source router
  • Icinga Editor - GUI for generating Icinga configuration files

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

Weekly phpMyAdmin contributions 2017-W07

Last week was mostly spent on bugfixing what can be easily seen from list of handled issues, which got quite large this week.

There is probably nothing extraordinary in the list, just dozens of issues which appeared in the 4.7.0 beta. The final 4.7.0 should be out in a month, so it's really time to polish it. Also it's time to work on translations, so that's something where you help is welcome.

Handled issues:

What's coming in Weblate 2.12

Weblate should be released by end of February, so it's now pretty much clear what will be there. So let's look at some of the upcoming features.

There were many improvements in search related features. They got performance improvements (this is especially noticeable on site wide search). Additionally you can search for strings within translation project. On related topic, search and replace is now available for component or project wide operations, what can help you in case of massive renaming in your translations.

We have worked on improving machine translations as well, this time we've added support for Yandex. In case you know some machine translation service which we do not yet support, please submit that to our issue tracker.

Biggest improvement so far comes for visual context feature - it allows you to upload screenshots which are later shown to translators to give them better idea where and in which context the translation is used. So far you had to manually upload screenshot for every source string, what was far from being easy to use. With Weblate 2.12 (and this is already available on Hosted Weblate right now) the screenshots management got way better.

There is now separate interface to manage screenshots (see screenshots for Weblate as an example), you can assign every screenshot to multiple source strings, however you can also let Weblate automatically recognize texts on the screenshots using OCR and suggest strings to assign. This can save you quite a lot of effort, especially with screenshots with lot of strings. This feature is still in early phase, so the suggestions are not always 100% matching, but we're working to improve it further.

There will be some more features as well, you can look at our 2.12 milestone at GitHub to follow the process.

Weekly phpMyAdmin contributions 2017-W06

Last week brought release of SQL parser with optional dependency on motranslator what made it lightweight to use for third party tools which are not interested in localization. Besides that the SQL parser code got several other improvements as well.

Another important update came to our Docker image which was finally updated to 4.6.6 (sorry, I forgot to do that on release time)

Handled issues:

Weekly phpMyAdmin contributions 2017-W05

Last week was a bit shorter for me due to travel to FOSDEM where I have helped Software Freedom Conservancy on a stand. More than thousand of our users have brought phpMyAdmin sticker from there :-).

There was also some progress on the code of course. Mostly it's about reviewing bug reports for first beta we've released for 4.7.0. We know there are some things broken and we are working hard to fix these.

There was also quite important change on our SQL parser - the localization is now optional, so you don't have to install motranslator as dependency (this is only in Git right now, will be released this week).

Handled issues: