W środę, o godzinie 16 gościem Czaterii (Interia.pl) będzie nie kto inny jak Seth Bindernagel, menedżer zespołu l10n-drivers w Mozilli. Seth zajmuje się zarządzaniem całym procesem internacjonalizacji i lokalizacji na (już) 63 języki produktów Mozilli (w tym Fennec, Thunderbird, Firefox).
Seth jest duszą towarzystwa, facetem, który choć nie ma żadnego doświadczenia technicznego zajeżdza innych, żeby pomogli mu zrozumieć Mercuriala (ostatnio sam stworzył pierwszego patcha!), ogarnia cały zespół, stworzył pierwszy zestaw celów kwartalnych w historii prac nad L10n i stara się otworzyć Mozillę na współpracę z innymi projektami lokalizacyjnymi. Można z nim spędzić 15 minut i rozwiązać najważniejsze problemy, albo siedzieć do 5 nad ranem w siedzibie w Paryżu przygotowując 6 nowych lokalizacji, które zostały dodane w Firefoksie 3.0.4.
Poza tym jest doskonałym kompanem do kufla piwa i pierwszą osobą w historii mojej pracy w Mozilli, która wyciągneła sporą ekipę do klubu 🙂
A, no, i… no i zupełnie przypadkiem jest menedżerem moim i staszka oraz opiekuje się adrianem podczas jego stażu w Mozilli Corporation. 🙂
Jego największym marzeniem jest dołączyć do Polish Mafia i właśnie odwiedza warszawę z okazji Internet CEE.
wondering if that gives me the “longest trip home” award from EuMozCamp crew. William, beer will do this. 🙂
The event was great, I’ve been at so many mozilla events during last 8 years yet beyond “normal” awesomeness of those events, once againt some elements of what happened were a big surprise (Mix group – you know who you are) 🙂
For now I’m attaching Silme talk slides, for those who couldn’t make it to the talk. (it’s also the very best documentation we have so far):
First update after public announcement. During last week, Silme received several minor stability patches in trunk and got initial support (patches [1], requests, feedback on API) from several developers including Stefan Plewako from Aviary.pl and Flock projects, Adrian Kalla from Aviary.pl and an intern in Mozilla Corp., and Pike himself 🙂
Beside of that I spent some time during Firefox Summit on talking with people of Pootle/TranslationToolkit fame to identify potential problems that they faced. It was extremely supportive for me and gave my major take away is that if I want to reach my goal of having one, common abstraction layer for l10n objects I have to merge two very different concepts – single locale files (like DTD, properties, ini) and multi-locale files (XLIFF, GetText, tc).
Multilocale branch has been ignited to address this. I already did several tests and it seems that I will be able to support both models in one API without making both feel like hacks.
Pike raised another concern, that I tried to keep for later which is a concept of entity/l10nObject processing. Initially I assumed that it’s a minor topic, and on this level of abstraction I assumed that leaving the entity values unprocessed is OK for now. Unfortunately, especially with L20n being the next Big Thing for Silme, entity processing becomes very important and has to become a legimate element of the library skeleton.
I started early hacks of l20n.py format parser leaving my brain in free conceptual thinking mode and waiting for Pike’s time to talk about grammar inconsistencies.
Last big thing to come is a soon to happen switch from svn repo on my server, to shiny new hg.mozilla.org. This requires me to spend a few hours on svn-to-hg migration tools, but should help with later branching and support easier collaboration between many developers.
Current roadmap is pretty dense for stage3, and may be latter splitted, but does not currently involve work on end-user oriented apps like a webtool. Once I have this two major restructurizations ready (multilocale/pre-processing), I’ll get back to providing proof-of-concept tools. We’re of course looking for more developers so let me know if you’re interested 🙂
Last half a year was amazing for me. I joined Mozilla Corp., reignited my participation in Mozilla project, worked on several exciting projects and it’s an amazing coincident that this half a year is almost over exactly now, when I’m sitting at Whistler, with 400 creative, innovative people and we’re all listening to Mitchell Baker speaking about our open source roots, and the trunk of the project being about “Human interaction with the Internet”… It’s thrilling.
There are several projects that I’m trying to launch related to Mozilla, I will be speaking about them during the Firefox Summit, and I will blog about it once the summit people share their feedback on it.
One of the elements of Mozilla ecosystem that has been super exciting for me is localization and internationalization. And the great news is that there’s a lot happening around L10n in Mozilla these days. We’re improving the l10n build system, l10n processes, but there’s one very visibly missing area in L10n land – tools. We finally have a project that is going to target this – Verbatim. Verbatim is a project aiming for a webtool that will allow localizers focus on the translation instead of having to spend time trying to figure out how to do the actual translation. If you’re in Whistler, we have a presentation on Verbatim today 🙂
But that’s not all! There is one project that was something I’ve been coding over weekends and while at the airports and on flights and in many other places. It’s inspiring and challenging for me enough to keep working on it over evenings, nights, sundays, and holidays which I have to apologize for to my girlfriend 🙁
Yesterday, I tagged stage2 of the project which means it’s more or less ready to go public and be reviewed by you all, and has a chance to explain itself to the level that may attract others to join me and participate in it.
The project name is Silme, and it is a python localization library that has been structured in a multi-abstract level model. Thanks to it, the library works natively with DTD, Properties, GetText, can work with XLIFF, L20n, ini files and any other l10n data format. Beside, it can work with files stored on drive, in SVN, in CVS, in MySQL, SQLite and virtually any other data source.
On the other hand it’s extensible and flexible enough to work in web app, command line tools, or GUI tools. It’s not only for Mozilla, as any other project can build apps on top of this library. Be it Songbird, Miro, Seamonkey, Firefox, Thunderbird, Addons.mozilla.org, Flock, GNOME, KDE, etc., etc.
If you find above description interesting, please read the original announcement and join the project. It’s totally open and very alpha. If I try to express where I am with it, I think I just passed the mark when the code self explains the idea. Nothing more.
Beside, it’s a lib. Unless people like to localize directly in python env, we need apps on top of it. And it’s at least as challenging as a library itself, but if you want to write a localization app, I think it’ll be easier if you will be able to focus on UI and features of the app, and minimize the work on sole entity operations that Silme does cover.
So… here we are. I’m confident I will keep working on it, and some small simple apps will be created for my own use, but it’s very, very far from being useful, and need a lot of work to get there. Ultimate goal will be to work smoothly with an exciting project that is being mindcrafted in Mozilla these days – L20n.
Please, remember that it’s a hobby library for now, a product of several years of work as localizer, countless nights spent with my friends from Aviary.pl – Polish Localization Team, and the creative environment of Mozilla project. It’s up to you all what will happen next with it 🙂 So mail me, or reach me on IRC if you want to discuss things about possibilities that Silme opens!
You may say it’s a small thing. Who cares? Opera, IE, Safari lives without it and you can rarely see users complaining that their browser lacks scriptable zipwriter, right?
Hah! Mozilla is a platform, not “a browser”. It *does* influence any effort towards Xul editors, Mozilla IDE’s and… L10n tool 😉
Flock 0.9 is out! It took a bit longer than expected, but things are moving fast now on the track for Flock 1.0.
Because of the huge amount of work and changes in the codebase, Flock 0.9 is not ready for localization yet. Enjoy this release, test, give Flock a feedback, and if you’re lucky to speak fluently any language other than English, join us in the localization effort for 0.9.5!
The initial announcement went online last week and tomorrow we’ll start the localization phase for Flock 0.9.5 due to be released late this month.
Right now I’m doing last bits of cleanup to reduce the amount of work for localizers and starting from tomorrow, the localization will ignite 🙂 Check the Flock l10n maillist for more news!
