This paragraph is here for historical reasons and is irrelevant after the initial process has run once.

The template.pot is generated from the Debian Installer repository by merging together all debian/po/templates.pot files. The scripts/l10n/l10n-sync script may be used for this. First check that no PO files stay in packages/po when running it for the first time.

This paragraph is here for historical reasons and should be now irrelevant as all languages translations have been switched to the master file.

This process is meant to collect together all translations spread out in the individual package, for one language, and merge them in a single master file. This action should only happen once for each language.

The detailed process follows. For each step, the following list will mention whether the action is to be done by the language translators or by the Debian Installer i18n coordinators.

An helper script named switch-language has been written to handle this switch to the master file. Using it absolutely needs that no action happens simultaneously on the switched language files. Translators are requested to not use it and rather ask one of the Debian Installer i18n coordinators to do it for themselves.

The l10n-sync script is run periodically by one of the Debian Installer i18n coordinators. It should preferrably be run on a reliable Debian host such as people.debian.org and will update the general template.pot and all PO files from individual templates.pot files from all Debian Installer packages.

While running, this script will also run debconf-updatepo for each Debian Installer package and will commit back the regenerated templates.pot files (package maintainers often forget running debconf-udpatepo when commiting changes to English templates).

During normal development, this synchronization process is run once a day. During release preparations, the frequency will be increased to speed up the full cycle.

When operating on the sarge branch, the l10n-sync will also merge translations from master files in the trunk branch, by using the --merge option. Synchronisations on the sarge branch only occur once a week.

The general process is:

This system minimizes race conditions which could trigger conflicts.

The conflict windows have been minimised as much as possible in the l10n-sync script. However, in order to limit the number of commits made by the script, files are not commited as soon as they are modified (except by using the --atomic-commits switch which slows down the whole process a lot and triggers a lot of commit actions). So, the script is sometimes likely to trigger conflicts. For that reason, it will stop working on a SVN copy where SVN conflict files are present. This explains why this script must always be monitored even when it is scheduled to execute periodically.

The l10n synchronisation script is kept in Debian Installer repository in the scripts/l10n-utilities directory and is named l10n-sync.

This is a shell script (which may contain some bashisms until a skilled shell programmer cleans it out).

The script uses some command-line switches which may affect its behaviour. Some of these switches are mostly present for historical reasons and are kept because they may have some new use in the future:

The script needs the location of the local copy of the Debian Installer repository as an argument. It makes some simple checks about the copy. A partial SVN checkout may be used, with only the packages/ directory.

When using this script with commits, the Debian Installer copy must be as clean as possible. It should not be used for development tasks. The script checks for possible SVN conflict files and aborts if it finds some.

Prospective languages (see Section 6.3, “ Prospective languages ”) are handled in a special way: for all such languages, the translations are not copied in the individual packages directories.

When languages are on early stages of translation after they have been added through the new language process (Chapter 3, The New Language Process: adding a new language to Debian Installer), they are temporarily listed in a file named packages/po/PROSPECTIVE.

Languages listed in that file are excluded from synchronization, and, therefore, PO files are not created in individual packages. As a consequence, activating a language means that the language code is removed from the PROSPECTUVE file.

A special file, named packages/po/packages_list, lists the Debian Installer packages which are included in the master files. This file also sorts these packages by order or priority for translations. The strings at the beginning of the files are to be translated first.

The Debian Installer packages maintainers must request for their packages to be included in this file, when they estimate that their package is ready for translation. Only Debian Installer i18n coordinators can integrate packages there, after checking that the strings have been reviewed.

Being aimed to be an automated process with automated commits, the script requires a few prerequisites to be run without user interaction.

First of all, when run from a cron job, the script has to be able to commit files. This means that the account it is run from should use a SSH key with an empty passphrase and add this key to the account it commits to on svn.debian.org.

First, create a SSH key with an empty passphrase and put it in a special file:

user@host:~> ssh-keygen -t dsa
Generating public/private dsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/home/user/.ssh/id_dsa): \
        /home/user/.ssh/nopass
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:
Your identification has been saved in /home/user/.ssh/nopass.
Your public key has been saved in /home/user/.ssh/nopass.pub.
The key fingerprint is:
75:fa:62:54:2c:34:09:96:ad:f2:57:cf:16:ce:74:69 bubulle@mykerinos

Then, this key should be added to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on svn.debian.org for the Alioth account (<alioth_account>) under which identity commits will be done.

Finally, on the host from which l10n-sync runs will happen, the following should be added to ~/.ssh/config:

host svn.debian.org
  user <alioth_account>
  IdentityFile /home/user/.ssh/nopass

Of course, this actually means that this local account will then be able to commit to svn.debian.org with <alioth_account> as identity, without further control. This means that the account the script is run with should be very safely protected.

Some mechanisms have been implemented to add more safety and remote control possibilities to the synchronisation script.

First of all, before doing any work, the script opens a special file kept in the SVN repository and named packages/po/run-l10n-sync. The "run=" line in this file mentions whether synchronisation should happen or not. If the file contains "run=0", then the script will exit without taking any action.

This mechanism gives all Debian Installer developers with commit access to the SVN repository a very simple way to disable the synchronization script actions. For this, developers just need to change the file and commit the new version.

While the script is disabled, runs can still be enforced by using the --force swith, which will ignore the packages/po/run-l10n-sync file.

While it is running, the script also creates a file named .l10n-sync.lock at the root of the local copy of Debian Installer repository. The file is removed only after successful runs of the script. When this file already exists, the script does not run and exits with an error message.

This mechanism prevents running the synchronization script twice on the same Debian Installer repository checkout copy.

(this section should be updated when the script run conditions are changed)

The script actually runs under Christian Perrier account on people.debian.org.

It is run through cron jobs:

TODO

A special cron entry is also added in order to allow other Debian Installer developers to trigger runs of the script at any moment. They just need to create a specialf "flag" file on people.debian.org (this restricts the feature to official Debian developers who have an account on this machine).

As people.debian.org is a woody machine and as the behaviour of gettext utilities such as msgmerge changes with the version of Debian GNU/Linux systems, Debian Installer developers should avoid using the script on other machines to avoid useless massive commits.