Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for SUSE

Weblate is not only useful for translating software, it can help in translating any content. Let's look where our users are using it.

Software translation is the most usual use case. This is actually where Weblate was used for first time and still provides great support for that. As an example (and oldest project hosted in Weblate) you can look at phpMyAdmin, where Weblate also helps to keep in sync translation for different maintenance branches. It can also help you in using same terminology in command line utility and graphical one like it is done in Gammu and Wammu translations.

Weblate also supports localization of mobile application. Android support was originally implemented for OsmAnd project, but now they also translate iOS application using Weblate.

Another use case is for translating documentation. You need to have some infrastructure to do, but there are several free software project to help here as well. For phpMyAdmin documentation or documentation for python module Odorik the Sphinx documentation generator is used, which has support for translation of the documentation. I've recently published quick howto for this setup. Another great tool for translating documentation is Publican, it is Docbook based tool and is used for translating The Debian Administrator's Handbook.

Last but not least, you can use Weblate to translate your website. For example website for Weblate itself is translated this way.

Did you miss your use case for Weblate? Please let me know.

PS: I've heard that one Linux distribution will start using Weblate soon.

Up to recently, the only social presence for Weblate was my personal Twitter account. It's time to change that.

You can now follow news and information about Weblate on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

Weblate 2.3 has been released today. It comes with better features for project owners, better file formats support and more configuration options for users.

Full list of changes for 2.3:

• Dropped support for Django 1.6 and South migrations.
• Support for adding new translations when using Java Property files
• Allow to accept suggestion without editing.
• Improved support for Google OAuth2.
• Added support for Microsoft .resx files.
• Tuned default robots.txt to disallow big crawling of translations.
• Simplified workflow for accepting suggestions.
• Added project owners who always receive important notifications.
• Allow to disable editing of monolingual template.
• More detailed repository status view.
• Direct link for editing template when changing translation.
• Allow to add more permissions to project owners.
• Allow to show secondary language in zen mode.
• Support for hiding source string in favor of secondary language.

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.

After recent porting python-gammu to Python 3, it was quite obvious to me that new release will have some problems. Fortunately they have proven to be rather cosmetic and no big bugs were found so far.

Anyway it's time to push the minor fixes to the users, so here comes python-gammu 2.2. As you can see, the changes are pretty small, but given that I don't expect much development in the future, it's good to release them early.

After Monday release of separate Gammu and python-gammu, the obvious task was to get the new package to distributions.

First I've started with Debian packages, what was quite easy as from quite complex CMake + Python package it is now purely CMake and it was mostly about removing stuff. Soon the updated Gammu package was uploaded to experimental. Once having that ready, I've also update the backports for Ubuntu and these are available in Gammu PPA. Creating new python-gammu package was a bit harder as this is the first Python 3 compatible package I've created, but it's now ready and sitting in the NEW queue.

While working on python-gammu package, I've realized that some of the data used in testsuite are missing in the tarball. While not being critical, this is definitely not nice, so I've decided to release python-gammu 2.1 today. It also includes fixes for some corner cases found by coverity.

For openSUSE the packaging was quite easy as well, stripping out unneeded parts of Gammu package went smoothly and it's now in hardware project, SR to Factory is pending. With python-gammu it turned out to be much harder as the testsuite had failed there with some strange error coming out of libdbi. After looking deeper into it, the problem is in new return type available in Git snapshot openSUSE is shipping. Fortunately producing fix was quite easy, so next Gammu upstream will handle that properly and package in hardware project is already patched. You can now use python-python-gammu from devel:languages:python and SR to Factory is pending as well.

I've spent first day of SUSE Hackweek on Gammu. There are quite many tasks to be done and I wanted to complete at least some of them.

First I started with the website. I did not really like the old layout and aggressive colors and while touching it's code it's good idea to make the website work well in mobile devices. I've started with conversion to Bootstrap and It turned out to be quite easy task. The next step was making the pages simpler as in many places there was too much information hidden in sidebar. While doing content cleanup, I've removed some features which really don't make much sense these days (such as mirror selection). Anyway read more in the news entry on the site itself.

Second big task was to add support for Python 3 in python-gammu. It seems that world is finally slowly moving towards Python 3 and people started to request python-gammu to be available there as well. The porting itself took quite some time, but I've mostly completed it before Hackweek. Yesterday, there was just some time spent on polishing and releasing standalone python-gammu and Gammu without python bindings. Now you can build python-gammu using distutils or install it using pip install python-gammu.

As usual, I look at the application stats for phpMyAdmin just after student application period of Google Summer of Code is over.

First of all we got way more proposals than in last years, but also number of bogus proposals went up (you can see them as ignored in the chart).

Same as in past years, people leave the submission to the last moment, even though we encourage them to submit early so that they can adjust the application based on our feedback. But still we got more than half of the proposals in last three days.

Anyway we're just working on evaluation and will finalize it in upcoming days. Of course you will know the results from Google on April 27th.

PS: You can compare to our 2014, 2013 and 2012 numbers.

Weblate 2.2 has been released today. It comes with improved search, user interface cleanup and various other fixes.

Full list of changes for 2.2:

• Performance improvements.
• Fulltext search on location and comments fields.
• New SVG/javascript based activity charts.
• Support for Django 1.8.
• Support for deleting comments.
• Added own SVG badge.
• Added support for Google Analytics.
• Improved handling of translation file names.
• Added support for monolingual JSON translations.
• Record component locking in a history.
• Support for editing source (template) language for monolingual translations.
• Added basic support for Gerrit.

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.

In past days, several new free software projects have been added to Hosted Weblate. If you are interested in translating your project there, just follow instruction at our website.

The new projects include:

• Webcamoid, a webcam capture application
• Loowid, a webconference solution based on webrtc
• Money Manager EX, a personal finance software
• Noosfero hosting was extended to cover plugins as well

PS: Added later during the week:

• Boilr, a cryptocurrency and bullion price alarms for Android
• SwitchyOmega, a proxy manager and switcher for Chromium

After releasing Weblate 2.0 with Bootstrap based UI, there was still lot of things to improve. Weblate 2.1 brought more consistency in using buttons with colors and icons. Weblate 2.2 will bring some improvements in other graphics elements.

One of thing which was for quite long in our issue tracker is to provide own renderer for SVG status badge. So far Weblate has offered either PNG badge or external SVG rendered by shields.io. Relying on external service was not good in a long term and also caused requests to third party server on many pages, what could be considered bad privacy wise.

Since this week, Weblate can render SVG badge on it's own and they are also matching current style used by other services (eg. Travis CI):

One last thing which really did not fit into new UI were activity charts. In past they were rendered as PNG on server side, but for upcoming releases we have switched to use Chartist javascript library and render them as SVG on client side. This way we can nicely style them to fit into page, they scale properly and also reduce server load. You can see them in action on Hosted Weblate server: