Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for Weblate

For quite some time I have some cryptocurrencies on hold. These mostly come from times it was possible to mine Bitcoin on the CPU, but I've got some small payments recently as well.

I've been using Electrum wallet so far. It worked quite well, but with increasing Bitcoin value, I was considering having some hardware wallet for that. There are few options which you can use, but I've always preferred Trezor as that device is made by guys I know. Also it's probably device with best support out of these (at least I've heard really bad stories about Ledger support).

In the end what decided is that they are also using Weblate to translate their user interface and offered me the wallet for free in exchange. This is price you can not beat :-). Anyway the setup was really smooth and I'm now fully set up. This also made me more open to accept other cryptocurrencies which are supported by Trezor, so you can now see more options on the Weblate donations page.

Hosted Weblate provides also free hosting for free software projects. The hosting requests queue has grown too long, so it's time to process it and include new project.

This time, the newly hosted projects include:

• Hunspell - famous spell checker
• Eolie - a web browser for GNOME
• SkyTube - an open-source YouTube app for Android
• Eventum - issue tracking system

Additionally there were some notable additions to existing projects:

• Password management module for Pext
• Minetest Mod Hopper
• Ayatana Indicators now include several new applets

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

Upcoming Weblate 2.17 will bring improved access control settings. Previously this could be controlled only by server admins, but now the project visibility and access presets can be configured.

This allows you to better tweak access control for your needs. There is additional choice of making the project public, but restricting translations, what has been requested by several projects.

You can see the possible choices on the UI screenshot:

On Hosted Weblate this feature is currently available only to commercial hosting customers. Projects hosted for free are limited to public visibility only.

Hosted Weblate provides also free hosting for free software projects. The hosting requests queue has grown too long, so it's time to process it and include new project.

This time, the newly hosted projects include:

• Gadgetbridge - cloudless replacement for your gadget vendors' closed source Android applications.
• SUSI AI Chat - artificial intelligence for personal assistants, robots, help desks and chatbots
• SUSI AI Android app - Susi Android App
• TeamWard Client - personal Android League Of Legends assistant
• User-Agent Switcher - easily override the browser's User-Agent string
• Safe Eyes - protect your eyes from asthenopia
• XCSoar - the open-source glide computer

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.

Since some time we're using siphash algorithm to speed up looking up strings in Weblate. Even though it is used by Python internally, it's not exposed in the standard library so several third party modules appeared in the PyPI. Out of all these siphashc or rather it's Python 3 fork siphashc3 seemed to perform best, so I've started to use that.

However it turned out that none of them is in active maintenance anymore. The original version lacks Python 3 support, while the siphashc3 uses odd versioning which causes problems to some pip versions.

After trying to get fix into siphashc3 without much of success, I've spoken to original author of siphashc and he has agreed to hand over maintainership to me. So it's new home is at https://github.com/WeblateOrg/siphashc and new release is already available on PyPI.

Note: Originally we were using MD5 in Weblate, but siphash has shown to be faster and fits into 64-bits, what makes it easier to store and index in SQL databases as LONGINT.

Hosted Weblate provides also free hosting for free software projects. The hosting requests queue was over one month long, so it's time to process it and include new project.

This time, the newly hosted projects include:

• ManaPlus - 2D MMORPG client
• Documentation for Tiled - a tile map editor
• OpenRefine - a tool for working with messy data and improving it
• Gradio - an app for finding and listening to internet radio stations
• RedReader - an unofficial open source Reddit client for Android.
• Arctica Framework - a pluggable remote services framework
• Ayatana Indicators - an application indicators framework
• Skolab Groupware - a continuation of Kolab Groupware

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.

Weblate 2.16 has been released today while I'm at DebConf17. There are quite some performance improvements (and more of that is scheduled for 2.17), new file formats support and various other improvements.

Full list of changes:

• Various performance improvements.
• Added support for nested JSON format.
• Added support for WebExtension JSON format.
• Fixed git exporter authentication.
• Improved CSV import in certain situations.
• Improved look of Other translations widget.
• The max-length checks is now enforcing length of text in form.
• Make the commit_pending age configurable per component.
• Various user interface cleanups.
• Fixed component/project/sitewide search for translations.

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 on https://hosted.weblate.org/ as official translating service for phpMyAdmin, OsmAnd, Turris, 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.

I've made several changes to the Weblate Docker container which are worth mentioning today.

First of all if you are still using nijel/weblate, you should switch to weblate/weblate. They both currently share same configuration, but it might happen that some future updates will go to the weblate owned container only.

Now back to the container changes. Since beginning we were using Django built in server. That's fine for development purposes, but it really doesn't work that well in production as it can handle only one request at time. Therefore we've switched to more robust approach using nginx + uwsgi + supervisor.

Thanks to this, the docker-compose no longer needs separate nginx server as everything is now sanely handled within the weblate container itself.

After fours years, I will again make it to DebConf, I'm looking forward to meet many great people, so if you want to meet and happen to be in Montreal next week come and say hello to me :-).

It seems I've settled down on four year schedule - I've attended DebConf09 and DebConf13 so far. Let's see if next one will come in 2021 or earlier.

Weblate 2.16 is almost ready (I expect no further code changes), so it's really great time to contribute to it's translations! Weblate 2.16 will be probably released during my presence at DebConf 17.

As you might expect, Weblate is translated using Weblate, so the contributions should be really easy. In case there is something unclear, you can look into Weblate documentation.

I'd especially like to see improvements in the Italian translation which was one of the first in Weblate beginnings, but hasn't received much love in past years.