How to send translations to maintainers (was: Re: Call for translations : geneweb package debconf templates)

Quoting Ossama Khayat (okhayat@xxxxxxxxx):

> Translated to Arabic. File attached.


Thanks Ossama. One minor remark : in order to minimize the traffic on
debian-i18n, we should avoid sending translation files there.

So, I'll take your mail as an opportunity to give translators some
hints about the Right way to send translations. 

The translation would indeed better be sent as
a bug report against the relevant package, ie geneweb.

For this, if you are using a Debian system, you can use the
"reportbug" utility ("apt-get install reportbug" if you don't have it):

-either just launch reportbug and answer the questions. The bug
severity should be "wishlist" and the bug tags should be "l10n" and
"patch"

-or use the following command line (assuming your file is named
ar.po.bz2):

reportbug --attach=ar.po.bz2 --offline -s "geneweb: [INTL:ar] Arabic debconf 
templates translation" --severity=wishlist --tag=patch --tag=l10n 
--no-config-files --package-version="N/A" --list-cc="" geneweb

I recommend naming the files xx.po where xx is the ISO-639 code of
your language. That way, the maintainer will not need to wonder what
name should be used (some maintainers are not very aware of i18n
stuff....or some other have misconceptions and will for instance use
"cs_CZ.po" for Czech translations)

If you are not using a Debian system, you can still easily send bugs
reports:

Just send a mail to "submit@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx", with the file attached
and a Subject like "<package>: [INTL:ar] Arabic debconf templates
translation". Here you need to put the following pseudo-header lines
IN THE MAIL BODY:

Package: <package name>
Tags: l10n patch
Severity: wishlist

This is a generic method for sending bug reports against Debian
packages, of course, the example above uses the "l10n patch" tags and
the "wishlist" severity because this is what's needed when you send a
translation. For other bug reports, you may need other Tags and
Severity fields, of course.


About the file being compressed : this is of course a good idea
because doing do you prevent mail user agents, or other tools, to mess
up with the encoding of the file you send. So, this is especially
recommended for non Latin-based languages and even for non Latin-1
based languages.

This also minimizes the size of bug reports, of course....:-)

Hope these few hints will be useful to some of you, translators. I
know that you come from very various environments and thus more hints
about the "Debian way" to handle things may be helpful for you.



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