Projects need releases. It’s important. It’s like a birthday for a project – they get a milestone to mark the progress.
On the other hand we have developers. They need unlimited time and no deadlines. When one meet another, we have an interesting arm-wrestling battle between those two, but ultimately one has to obey to the Oath of the Bazaar, if you know what I mean.
Release
So, here we are, Silme was asking for a release for long enough and I postponed it over and over so it’s time to make the cut. Today, I’m proud to announce the very first official release of Silme – python l10n library. Silme has been announced to mozilla.dev.l10n long time ago, and since then it has been continuously developed in a small, but quite interesting project structure with support from Adrian Kalla, Stefan Plewako, Ricardo Palomares, Staś Małolepszy and management guidance from Seth Bindernagel.
It’s very, very hard to explain Silme concept to those who never tried to work on localization development.
Let me try: It’s like a DOM API for localization.
Works? Probably not… Well. Let me try the descriptive way. Silme is a toolset for a developer who wants to work on localization tools. It can read localization files, it can write them, it can modify them, it can search through them, it can process them, merge, split, localize and help you get some statistics out of the localization files. It probably can juggle them, although support for this is rather experimental.