[Debian-l10n-devel] Proposal: the way of DDTP back to ddtp.debian.org

[Martin Eberhard Schauer]

Hi Grisu,

thank your for your previous and your current work.
> The present:
>
> The DDTP has three parts:
>  - DDT (Debian Description Tracking), that daily tracks the
>    descriptions, update the Database, has a read only web interface to
>    this database.
>  - the DDTS (Debian Description Translation Server), the mail
>    interface, to submit new translations.
>  - the DDTSS (DDTS Satellite), the public web interface with his own
>    review process, this own database.
>
> The future:
>
> After some ups and downs we now can go back to a debian.org machine...
>
> Since some weeks, we work an a new, clean ddtp:
>  - Nicolas make a cleanup of the scripts for i18n and ddtp (during
>    debconf)
>  - kleptop start a rewrite of the web interface
>  - grisu add some new stuff for the web interface, make some bug
>    fixing and code on the new web interface
I believe it's a good time to become involved for those who do a lot of
DDTP work - it's about your tools. Which features do you really miss?
What would ease your work? Of course, I may have missed some
off-list communication ...
> I propose:
>
>  - package DDT (this make the daily update of the DDTP-Database)
>  - package DDTSS (the web interface of DDTP)
>  - install both on ddtp.debian.org
>  - test this system and after this
>  - switch from .net to .org
>
> With this we will lost the mail interface. (for some time...)
Do you want to package the production system or the development version?

The loss of the mail interface may be a problem for very small "teams" -
e. g. the vietnames translation effort actually seemed  to be a one woman
show.

For the impatient (possibility to skip three paragraphs): One doesn't 
really
need the mail interface to *get* new descriptions. The temporary loss
of the mail *will prevent*  people from bypassing the DDTSS for 
maintainance
tasks.

I will surely miss the possibility to upload changes which I consider to
be trivial and unproblematic (e.g. typofixes).

But I was not really satisfied with the mail interface - perhaps because I
don't know anything (yet) about scriptable Mail User Agents. I found it
very tedious to determine the next description to work on, to write a
mail requesting just one (sic!) description, save the attachment ...
I switched to pulling descriptions into the DDTSS by means of a script
and downloading with wget.

Perhaps it is a good idea to compare the packages at some time in
the future with home-grown scripts such as ricalcola_desc.sh that users
wrote for their personal DDTP goals - or to include their functionality in
the DDTSS. Perhaps is an inappropriate wording - there are some really
nice features already implemented in the development version.

Cheers,
    Martin