Bug Reporting for Language Packs

Discuss general development subjects that are not specific to a particular version like the versioning control system we use or other infrastructure.
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TerryE
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Bug Reporting for Language Packs

Post by TerryE »

I recently submitted a bugrep about a mistranslation, which was then immediately closed with the comment
Andreas Fischer wrote:Resolution: Invalid. Please bring this to the attention of the language pack maintainer. Languages other than British English are not maintained by the phpBB team.
Surely this practice doesn't make sense. What's the point of having an integrated Issue tracking system, when you can't report bugs on software that you make available for download from your site? What is wrong with setting up a per-language queue assigned to each NL maintainer / team. If you don't want to do this then you should at least document this clearly as a policy and document that such bugs are to be reported to the named contact in the common.php or whatever, so that phpBB admins don't waste their time reporting such bugs and your team closing them.

[BTW this is a general issue about workflow and documentation. In this case Andreas immediately passed the issue to Maël Soucaze who fixed it by return.]

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Qiaeru
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Re: Bug Reporting for Language Packs

Post by Qiaeru »

Hey,

Concerning the language issue, this has been fixed in my development repo and will be available in the next stable version release. Thanks anyway!

Concerning the bug reporting, most translations are linked to an international support community and/or are hosted in web-based hosting service for software development projects. That's a good location to report such bugs :) . You can also send a PM to the appropriate language pack maintainer via our Languages Page. He will receive an e-mail and can quickly fix the bug ;) .

Best regards,

TerryE
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Re: Bug Reporting for Language Packs

Post by TerryE »

Maël, I'd already said that you'd fixed this by return. No my point is about the process and integration of support. IIRC we've recently replaced the old NL database with a new Download->languages page. This new page looks sexy, but from an admin's point of view, personally this is a backward step. (OK, I help support 13 forums, ten of which are the OOo National Language ones and for these I need to download 15 different language packs apart from the bundled EN language to do my upgrades. The previous page had consistent file naming and a consistent content hierarchy, so my build process had a nice BASH scripted for loop using wgets and unpacked the directories into the correct ref307 subdirectory. This time I had to do the downloads manually, the organisation of the (now mandatory) zip comes from some random URL, e.g /customise/db/download/id_77161, and the structure varies from pack to pack so that this became an interactive drag and drop affair, with no script log as an audit. End of moan!)

The HomeCustomisation DatabaseLanguage Packs navigation lists 53 packs, but this is inconsistent with the 43 listed in the Download->languages menu. There is also no clear navigation path from development or support to the Discussion/Support tab, nor instructions on the Issue tracker redirecting admin to the appropriate modification / language support tab, which is why I missed it.

So I guess that this bleat is really about simplicity and consistency in advice and navigation paths, which is a pretty simple thing to fix:
  • If you want to separate out customisation support from phpBB core team support then you need to say so clearly on both landing pages.
  • If you want admins to use Discussion/Support tab for discussing support issues then the main navigation path to it shouldn't be from the Download menu. At its simplest, this may simply be a case of hoisting the Languages page to a top level tab.
PS. I do appreciate your fixing this. :-)
PPS. Not sure why b i tch is a forbidden word as it is rarely used in an offensive context.

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Qiaeru
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Re: Bug Reporting for Language Packs

Post by Qiaeru »

Hey,

Thank you, I take into account your feedbacks. We are constantly evolving and we need some feedbacks like that ;) . I will add, when phpBB 3.0.9 will be released, a little sentence to notice to the administrators the right location to post their support requests and report errors (the Discussion/Support tab). Concerning the listing, it's because some language packs are under development and are hidden to the public. Concerning the download structure, this will be unfortunately (for you) unchanged, the current system has many good feedbacks, it's fully functional and pleasant. I hope I have correctly answered your expectations.

Regards,

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bantu
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Re: Bug Reporting for Language Packs

Post by bantu »

TerryE wrote:Surely this practice doesn't make sense.
It does make sense, the major fact being that the phpBB team does not speak all languages provided on the download page.
TerryE wrote:What's the point of having an integrated Issue tracking system, when you can't report bugs on software that you make available for download from your site? What is wrong with setting up a per-language queue assigned to each NL maintainer / team.
The problem wouldn't be setting up such a tracker, the problem would be getting it accepted by the translator community. Because (as I already pointed out above) we cannot fix those tickets, we cannot even say whether they are valid. Most translators probably don't want to use such a system, I even doubt most of them actually use a repository for versioning their files. Feel free to propose this in the translations forum at http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewforum.php?f=66 but I doubt you'd have any luck, especially considering that we just recently moved the language packs into the system where we also maintain other contributions where we have per-contribution support sections.
TerryE wrote:If you don't want to do this then you should at least document this clearly as a policy and document that such bugs are to be reported to the named contact in the common.php or whatever, so that phpBB admins don't waste their time reporting such bugs and your team closing them.
The language files (including common.php) are under control of the translators, as far as I know they are free to provide such information in their files. The german language pack files for example do include information about where to report bugs and other errors. As for documentation/policy, the language pack download page says "Downloads, Details & Support" which should be a good enough indicator for reporting bugs.
TerryE wrote:In this case Andreas immediately passed the issue to Maël Soucaze who fixed it by return.
I did not, must have been someone else. He may have noticed himself because in this case the language pack maintainer is a phpBB team member.
TerryE wrote:This new page looks sexy, but from an admin's point of view, personally this is a backward step. (OK, I help support 13 forums, ten of which are the OOo National Language ones and for these I need to download 15 different language packs apart from the bundled EN language to do my upgrades. The previous page had consistent file naming and a consistent content hierarchy, so my build process had a nice BASH scripted for loop using wgets and unpacked the directories into the correct ref307 subdirectory. This time I had to do the downloads manually, the organisation of the (now mandatory) zip comes from some random URL, e.g /customise/db/download/id_77161, and the structure varies from pack to pack so that this became an interactive drag and drop affair, with no script log as an audit. End of moan!)
I agree on everything here. Ideally, everything would be backed by repositories where you can just install a language pack by adding svn:externals or the git equivalent.

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