Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for Weblate

Weblate probably would not exist (or at least would be much harder to manage) without several services that help us to develop, improve and fix bugs in our code base.

Over the time the development world has become very relying on cloud services. As every change this has both sides - you don't have to run the service, but you also don't have control on the service. Personally I'd prefer to use more free software services, on the other side I really love this comfort and I'm lazy to setup things which I can get for free.

The list was written down mostly for showing up how we work and the services are not listed in any particular order. All of the services provide free offerings for free software projects or for limited usage.

GitHub

I guess there is not much to say here, it has become standard place to develop software - it has Git repositories, issue tracker, pull requests and several other features.

Travis CI

Running tests on every commit is something what will make you feel confident that you didn't break anything. Of course you still need to write the tests, but having them run automatically is really great help. Especially great for automatically checking pull requests.

AppVeyor

Continuous integration on Windows - it's still widely used platform with it's quirks, so it's really good idea to test there as well. With AppVeyor you can do that and it works pretty nicely.

Codecov

When running tests it's good to know how much of your code is covered by them. Codecov is one of the best interfaces I've seen for this. They are also able to merge coverage reports from multiple builds and platforms (for example for wlc we have combined coverage for Linux, OSX and Windows coming from Travis CI and AppVeyor builds).

SauceLabs

Unit testing is good, but the frontend testing in browser is also important. We run Selenium tests in several browsers in SauceLabs to verify that we haven't screwed up something from the user interface.

Read the Docs

Documentation is necessary for every project and having it built automatically is nice bonus.

Landscape

Doing code analysis is a way to avoid some problems which are not spot during testing. These can be code paths not covered by test or simply coding style issues. There are several such services, but Landscape is my favorite one right now.

wlc 0.7, a command line utility for Weblate, has been just released. There are several new commands like translation file download or statistics fetching.

Full list of changes:

• Added reset operation.
• Added statistrics for project.
• Added changes listing.
• Added file downloads.

wlc is built on API introduced in Weblate 2.6 and still being in development, you need Weblate 2.10 for some feature (already available on our hosting offering). You can find usage examples in the wlc documentation.

Quite on the schedule, Weblate 2.10 is out today. This release brings Git exporter module, improves support for machine translation services and adds various CSV exports and API interfaces.

Full list of changes:

• Added quality check to check whether plurals are translated differently.
• Fixed GitHub hooks for repositories with authentication.
• Added optional Git exporter module.
• Support for Microsoft Cognitive Services Translator API.
• Simplified project and component user interface.
• Added automatic fix to remove control chars.
• Added per language overview to project.
• Added support for CSV export.
• Added CSV download for stats.
• Added matrix view for quick overview of all translations
• Added basic API for changes and units.
• Added support for Apertium APy server for machine 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, Aptoide, 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.

Today, Weblate got new home. The difference is not that big - it has been moved from my personal GitHub account to WeblateOrg organization.

The main motivation is to have all Weblate related repositories in one location (all others including wlc, Docker or website are already there). The move will also allow to better manage the project in future as having it in separate repositories provides less management options on GitHub than using organization.

In case you have cloned the git repository, please update

git remote set-url origin https://github.com/WeblateOrg/weblate.git

Of course all issue tracker locations have changed as well (I believe the redirect on GitHub will stay as long as I won't fork the repository, so expect it to work at least month). See GitHub documentation on repository moving.

I'm sorry for all the troubles, but I think this is really necessary move.

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:

• Harbour AllRadio - a radio player for online streaming radio (on Sailfishos/jolla mobile)
• Simpletask - a GTD tool for Android
• FSearch - a fast file search utility for GNU/Linux based on GTK+3
• Peek - a simple animated Gif screen recorder for Linux
• QTodoTxt - a cross platform todo.txt GUI
• Stykur - fitness journal for Android and iOS
• walabag - a self hostable application for saving web pages

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 today all Git repositories from Hosted Weblate are exported over https. The previous git URLs will continue to work for some time. The exact depreciation schedule is not yet decided as this URL might be included in various scripts and there is nothing pushing us to disable the service.

The new Git URLs are consistent with Weblate URLs, just with /git/ in the path, so for example when your project is https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/weblate/website/, you can clone it using git clone https://hosted.weblate.org/git/weblate/website/.

Another important change is for private repositories, this now requires authentication using API key. You can specify it on the clone URL (git clone https://user:key@hosted.weblate.org/git/weblate/website/) or use gitcredentials to store it separately. The API key can be obtained from your user profile API page (once you're authenticated to Weblate).

Slightly behind schedule (it should have been released in October), Weblate 2.9 is out today. This release brings Subversion support or improved zen mode.

Full list of changes:

• Extended parameters for createadmin management command.
• Extended import_json to be able to handle with existing components.
• Added support for YAML files.
• Project owners can now configure translation component and project details.
• Use "Watched" instead of "Subscribed" projects.
• Projects can be watched directly from project page.
• Added multi language status widget.
• Highlight secondary language if not showing source.
• Record suggestion deletion in history.
• Improved intuitivity of languages selection in profile.
• Fixed showing whiteboard messages for component.
• Keep preferences tab selected after saving.
• Show source string comment more prominently.
• Automatically install Gettext PO merge driver for Git repositories.
• Added search and replace feature.
• Added support for uploading visual context (screnshots) 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, Aptoide, 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.

Today, new version has been deployed on Hosted Weblate. It brings many long requested features and enhancements.

Adding project to watched got way simpler, you can now do it on the project page using watch button:

Another feature which will be liked by project admins is that they can now change project metadata without contacting me. This works for both project and component level:

And adding some fancy things, there is new badge showing status of translations into all languages. This is how it looks for Weblate itself:

As you can see it can get pretty big for projects with many translations, but you get complete picture of the translation status in it.

You can find all these features in upcoming Weblate 2.9 which should be released next week. Complete list of changes in Weblate 2.9 is described in our documentation.

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:

• JaMuz - Music management tool
• World-Weather - An Android app that uses the Open Weather Map API
• GNUSim8085 - A graphical simulator, assembler and debugger for the Intel 8085 microprocesso
• Commons Mobile App - Upload pictures from Android to Wikimedia Commons
• Debian Edu Documentation
• Duplicati - Store securely encrypted backups on cloud storage services

wlc 0.6, a command line utility for Weblate, has been just released. There have been some minor fixes, but the most important news is that Windows and OS X are now supported platforms as well.

Full list of changes:

• Fixed error when invoked without command.
• Tested on Windows and OS X (in addition to Linux).

wlc is built on API introduced in Weblate 2.6 and still being in development. Several commands from wlc will not work properly if executed against Weblate 2.6, first fully supported version is 2.7 (it is now running on both demo and hosting servers). You can usage examples in the wlc documentation.