FAQ on migration to Transifex.com

Overall migration plan
There is also a wiki page available with more information about the overall migration to transifex.net.

General questions about the migration

The core Fedora translation projects were migrated to transifex.net on Friday, February 18, 2011. Projects on Fedora Hosted will be given a chance to opt-out, and those who don't opt-out will be migrated over the next two weeks.

Why now and not wait for the next version?

We are lacking resources to manage our current infrastructure, and the L10n group decided that the Fedora 15 translations are in danger. All related Fedora groups (L10n, Infrastructure, Packaging, Docs and Board) have concluded that there is little risk in the move.

Where do I get the "tx" command-line utility?

The transifex client is currently available as the transifex-client package in Rawhide (pre-F16), and in the updates-testing repositories for Fedora 13, 14, and 15, and EPEL 5 and 6.

Where can I get more help on using the Transifex client?

Additional help for the Transifex client is available at http://help.transifex.net/user-guide/client/client-0.4.html.

Can i help in making the migration faster?

Yes. You can bootstrap the migration of a developer's project. When you create the project, assign maintainership to glezos and raven too, in order to hand over the maintainership to the proper developer when he creates an account on Transifex.

How do I migrate my team?

Here's the list of current teams on Transifex.

Existing maintainers who don't see their team there should create an account, login, and Request a team creation from that page.

If you are an active translator but your maintainer is not active any more, please follow the standard procedure to change the team maintainer. Contact your own team, create a vote, and send an email to trans-list with information on changing the team maintainership. We basically need to see that the whole team approves you as the maintainer, before approving you.

If in doubt, ask in #fedora-l10n by pinging one of the Fedora L10n maintainers listed here, or by sending them a message through Transifex or email.

Technical questions

My project has already been migrated, now what?

You'll need to become the project maintainer on Transifex, to be able to push source language strings, create new resources etc.

First, create an account on Transifex. On your Project Details page, you'll see that we've assigned a couple of temporary maintainers. Send a message to one of them to add you as the project maintainer.

My project has not been migrated yet, what do I do?

Create an account on Transifex and proceed to read the question below "How do I use "tx set" properly?".

How do I assign my project to the Fedora teams?

Most Fedora projects will want to use Fedora's translation teams. To do this, do the following: Navigate to Transifex → MyProject → Access Control → Outsource → "Fedora Project".

How do I use "tx set" properly?

It depends on how your project is set up. In all cases, the set up is a simple process, and you can find full documentation for the transifex-client package and the tx utility at http://help.transifex.net/user-guide/client/client-0.4.html.

All these instructions assume that you have already visited https://transifex.net and set up your project there. If you haven't done so yet, you can visit this link to add your project to Transifex. Note your project's slug on the site, which is usually its name rendered in all lowercase. If you can't remember that setting, visit the project page and select Edit to look at the settings.

Projects already imported
Most Fedora-upstream projects have already been imported at https://fedora.transifex.net, and you can use the search capability on that page to find yours.

The rest of the instructions will use the following conventions:

• $PROJECT_SLUG - the slug for your project. If you can't remember it, visit the project page and select Edit to see the setting; it also appears in the URL for the project.
• $RESOURCE_SLUG - the slug for a resource. If you can't remember it, visit the project page, select the resource, and then select Edit to see the setting; it also appears in the URL for the resource.
• $SOURCE_LANG - the source language for your project. Usually this is "en".
• $POTFILE - the POT file for a single-POT project, usually saved as po/<project_name>.pot

My project has a po/ folder, a single POT and multiple PO files

This is how many GNOME projects are set up.

In your checked-out project repository (e.g. a SVN checkout or git clone), run:

tx init

This command creates a ~/.transifexrc file for your user account, and a .tx/config file in your project working tree. You may commit the latter in your repo, so it's used across developers and be version-controlled.

To declare your POT file and the source language (probably "en"), run this command:

tx set --execute --auto-local -r $PROJECT_SLUG.$RESOURCE_SLUG -s $SOURCE_LANG -f $POTFILE 'po/<lang>.po'

To pull the latest translation (PO files) from transifex.net for all languages, run:

tx pull -a

My project uses multiple POTs

Each POT file will become a separate resource. If they are two, just run two set commands. With the next push, both of them will be pushed.

If they are too many, you can create a small script to replace the 'set' commands similar to this:

  for POTFILE in `ls pot`; do
    FILE=$(basename "$POTFILE" .pot)
    tx set --auto-local -r fedora-docs-relnotes.$FILE --source-language=en \
    --source-file pot/$FILE.pot "<lang>/$FILE.po" --execute
  done

Can you show me a full example?

Here are two examples: One creating a docs project with multiple POT files and one creating another project with a single POT file.

Do I have to add the .tx/config file to my project?

No. You can add the tx set commands needed to your build scripts and execute them each time you make a release if you prefer. Committing the .tx/config file to your repository simply speeds up the process.

Some of my languages could not be pushed

This happens when the language do not have a standard name. There are 260+ languages supported -- use one of them.

To push your languages and ignore the broken ones, use tx push -s -t --skip.

Other Questions

Why have my PO file comments been removed?

There are three types of comments in PO files:

• Developer-produced comments -- they are located before msgid and have a special prefix. This IS supported by Tx.
• Translator-produced comments -- same as above. This is PLANNED to be supported in Tx.
• Comments in PO file which are not attached to translatable entities. This is outside of Tx's scope.

Because Transifex now uses the POT file itself to generate all PO files, all comments inside your PO file are not kept. In fact, the PO file itself is not kept at all -- translations are stored in the database itself, allowing more flexibility and features. Hence, comments which were in the PO file are not retained.

Since traditionally copyright assignment was kept as comments on the top of PO files, starting from Transifex 1.0, one needs to track copyright history in a different way.

You should either keep copyright notices in a separate "README.translations" file or inside the POT file (again, POT file comments are retained). In the future, we plan to support copyright assignment in Transifex natively, however general comments won't be kept.

(related ticket: #675)