invention

Pavel's build system also produces debug builds which add a reference number for each string. This is really nice as we can quickly look up any untranslated/mistranslated string in the GSI file and then in the PO file (which led me to discover that the Send command on the file menu should be Stuur and isn't coming through for some reason...). Thanks Pavel!

The installation bitmap is now replaced properly in our builds, so branding support is complete. Also more work on my rebuild script so it remerges the original files (as debug versions are left behind).

My OpenOffice.org patches work, we have a nice splash screen (Fixed a problem with my mods to the build system where it was trying to get the patches from the wrong directory). The intro screen didn't come through though, so had to do a patch to scp/source/office/files.scp too.

In the process also defined a rebuild script for when I'm doing tweaking, so I don't have to unpack the source and do everything from scratch just to test a change.

Last night at church we had the final of three training seessions on being a multi-cultural community in South Africa. Jabu spoke about his experiences in the struggle, going to prison, what God did in his life. It reminded me of The Heavenly Man. Then Charles from the Foundation for Church-led restitution spoke about giving his farm for restitution to those who have been wronged, and Alastair spoke about restitution too ... Steve wrapped it up with presenting the education fund Jubilee is starting as a part of restitution.

Afterwards spoke to Jabu, he said he'd heard about the translation work, and wants the Zulu programs ... couldn't believe its free software ... said "it'll help people learn computers..." so hopefully translate.org.za is also doing something to redress the injustices of the past. Gave me extra motivation to release the Zulu translation, and make sure we're rounding off any bugs.

Did a bunch of bug fixing and enhancements on the translate tools today (mostly in response to emails on the list and from Dwayne) and helped Dwayne with problems with csv etc. Also tried to get GnomeMeeting going which we did in the end but the buzzing and slowness irritated me...

Finally did a patch to change the SplashScreens in OpenOffice.org and built it but no time to test it properly yet...

OK, hopefully I've wrapped up the encoding problems with properties files as well as some other bugs Dwayne reported. Tested this out on the Mozilla 1.6 Russian xpi and seemed to work fine (though I can't read the results)... So released it as translate 0.8 beta 1, for everyone else to test...

OK, I now have OpenOffice.org building nice English, Afrikaans, Zulu and Northern Sotho builds on Linux. Remaining issues:

• The license and readme files aren't being handled correctly for the non-English builds
• Character encoding problems (which I thought were fixed ; perhaps the gsi files are old)
• OpenOffice.org installs don't like installing more than one copy of the same version which is essential for testing multiple languages
• some translation fixing...

Great article on Automating Government with e-Governance in India talks about the need to simplify localization of Linux software:

Additional attention should be paid to simplifying the steps to add additional language support to the various Linux applications in order to further advance Linux adoption by government agencies. Finally, improved documentation will provide the needed boost to the many open-source supporters itching for a chance to add their favorite language to the many already supported by Linux.

That's exactly what translate.sourceforge.net is about. Anyone welcome to help out :-)

Aha! It was the OpenOffice build failing due to localize errors, I just need to find out what they are now (have install sets but not all files are built properly). If I keep on disagreeing with myself like this, I can provide hours of entertainment...

It was actually an error in my modification to Pavel's build scripts that stopped OpenOffice.org from building (it had built correctly but not produced the install sets). All fixed now. I still think OOo could take some simplification though...

This is unbelievable...

In The Bear's Lair: The Google gross-out, the Washington Times not only claims that Google is sinister ... they claim that the Internet is getting slower and slower and everyone may eventually abandon it ... because its so hard to find decent information on it ... I think they are contributing to the problem.

Well it would be nice if it would build. But localize tends to introduce horrible bugs.

The way this works is that for some bizarre reason localizations are merged into text-format resource files. If I can bear it I'll try describe the system some time. But the point it that the tool that merges them sometimes messes it up and produces invalid files. So the build system has a script that fixes some of them and a patch that fixes others. Of course, the patch won't work if you don't have exactly the same set of languages and gsi files... <Sigh/>

I'll try again another day.

Started working on OpenOffice.org stuff again today, wanting to get splash screens etc in. So I set up Pavel's nice build system . It uses ccache so you can pull out a fresh source tree each time without worrying about recompiling stuff.

Except it took hours to get it downloaded. So in the mean time, I reconfigured it to be more modular, so options per platform are listed in separate files. And added a list of language fields (since the openoffice build system seems to have an insane variety of ways of referring to a language) which you can then pull out whatever you want at the right time. Then in languages.selected, I can just say to following to only merge in the appropriate languages:

MERGE_BASTARDS="afrikaans northernsotho zulu"

Trying to build now... If it works, will probably put the build scripts into our cvs...

starting blogging... yay!