Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for English

I've just changed scripts used to generate dictionaries for StarDict to avoid creating new tarballs when there is no real change in the data. This should avoid needless updates of the tarballs and automatically built packages when there is no real change in the data underneath.

If you somehow relied on fact that there is new tarball/package every day (or month for "stable" versions), this is no longer true and new ones will be generated only on changes.

I only hope I've tested everything properly and tarballs will really be generated on change :-).

It's time to report again progress on phpMyAdmin translations. I will make it shorter this time :-).

There has been great progress in translation progress. Japanese translation is near completing (only 55 messages are missing right now) thanks to Yuichiro who did tremendous work there. There is also ongoing effort for Sinhala translation lead by Madhura Jayaratne. Nevertheless the number of complete translations is still 14 (see my previous post for complete list).

Besides translating phpMyAdmin itself, there was lot of work on translating documentation, so we now have complete documentation translated to Spanish and very good progress on Chinese one.

As the final release of 3.4.0 is really close, anybody is welcome to translate missing bits. Any Norwegian, Polish or Finnish readers of this blog? I'm sure you can still make your translation complete! (Others are welcome as well of course.)

There seem to be lot of momentum in discussions about making Debian testing more attractive to users on debian-devel mailing list (see Lucas's summary for summary of the lengthy discussion).

One of the raised points there is that Debian misses equivalent of Ubuntu's PPA or openSUSE build service. As Debian is usually about do-ocracy, it will be there once it will be implemented, but I still don't think it is always useful to have such thing.

The problem with both (but this is especially the case for openSUSE build service) is that you need to add dozens of home: projects with questionable quality of the software. This usually leads to horrible mess, especially in case of incompatible libraries with different build options (anybody using wxWidgets?).

It can definitely lower barrier for people to create packages for the distro, but is it really good to lower barrier that much? I'd really prefer new things to be uploaded to Debian itself without need to use any external repositories, it would ensure at least some level of quality and compatibility with other packages.

Finally some picture published on time. Going to slightly larger animals this week. Picture taken at parkour race in Prague.

Taken again using PENTAX K7 + PENTAX-DA 70mm F2.4 Limited.

Slightly delayed, but here comes photo for last week. I simply failed to download it from camera and process it. Continuing in animal macro, this time it is frog somewhere in Beskydy mountains.

Taken again using same combo PENTAX K7 + PENTAX-DA 35mm F2.8 Macro Limited.

This year we will have two more projects is GSoC comparing to last year, the chosen ones being:

• OpenGIS support for phpMyAdmin by Madhura Jayaratne
• Zoom-search by Ammar Yasir
• Browse-mode Improvements ++ by Aris Feryanto
• Drizzle support by Piotr Przybylski
• AJAXify phpMyAdmin Interface by Thilanka Kaushalya
• Support for Procedures: Creating a user friendly interface for the manipulation of routines, triggers and events in phpMyAdmin by Rouslan Placella
• Query statistics & charts for the status page by Tyron
• phpMyAdmin Automated Testing by Zarubin Stas

Looking forward to cooperation with new students, especially Madhura, Rouslan and Tyron, which I will be mentoring.

As you can see in week number, I failed to take photo every week. Nevertheless I will try to continue, maybe I won't skip that much. To compensate it a little, I've decided to publish two photos taken in Prague Botanical Garden on annual butterfly event.

We're heading to release candidates for phpMyAdmin 3.4.0 (probably once GSoC application/evaluation rush period is over), so the translators have less time to make the translations better. There is no new complete translation, so we still have 14 translations at 100%:

• Catalan
• Chinese (China)
• Czech
• Dutch
• English (United Kingdom)
• French
• German
• Greek
• Italian
• Russian
• Slovenian
• Spanish
• Swedish
• Turkish

There are still lot of translations which would need some love, for example:

• Finnish
• Norvegian
• Polish

Recently two of our prospective GSoC students started to contribute to translations, so there is great progress in Sinhala and Hindi translations. Looking forward to have these completed soon :-).

You can also help make translation to your language better! If your language is missing just let me know (either in comments or by email).

Reading GSoC applications is sometimes funny. This year I've decided to be active only in phpMyAdmin projects, but this still gives enough interesting texts.

Some people definitely did not even care about looking at our name and think phpMyAdmin is written in C:

I assume this project would require C/C++ programming and, of course, SQL.

We ask people to tell us a little about their real life, in most cases this includes information where did the student study and so on, but sometimes it is just:

I'm a fairly standard guy.

In some cases people rather use some random file sharing service to post their CV and I'm too impatient to wait for several minutes till free download is available and I'm definitely not going to pay to download it.

PS: As usual, the last day we receive most incomplete proposals over the time. Generally I think that the best proposals arrive at beginning and the quality lowers. This is probably heavily influenced by our requirements for students to know the code before and advertising GSoC early, so that the really interested ones are ready to submit proposals as soon as the interface is open, while others trying to catch train later.

Looking at current state of some phpMyAdmin translations, I came to conclusion that some are not worth shipping, because they really do not translate reasonable amount of the interface. The problematic question is where to draw the line. For 3.4.0-rc1 I drew it at 50% of messages, what means that 25 languages currently pass. It might look too strict and the threshold will most likely change for final 3.4.0, but we need to start somewhere.

While discussing this topic on mailing list, Tyron Madlener came with idea to tell users of incomplete translations about it and point them to information how to contribute. I quickly implemented this idea and it is now in git and live on demo server. I deliberately decided not to remove incomplete translations on demo server, maybe they will attract new contributors thanks to new warning on main page.