Improving the translation process

[Julien Lepiller]

Hi guix!

Our current translation process involves sending a source tarball to the TP. 
Updating a translation is a manual process that can't be done too often, and I 
don't think the TP is very user friendly. I'd like to set up another service, 
such as weblate.

The Fedora people have recently switched to it and are inviting other free 
software projects, so it could be a nice way to setup this new process, before 
we can make our own service and host it. I've talked with someone responsible 
for weblate at Fedora, and they would be pleased to help us. We could also 
apply for the main instance at hosted.weblate.org.

As I see it, we don't want any of these instances to have push rights on our 
repos. The idea is to have a separately hosted repo for translations, used only 
by weblate. We would host a bot to regularly  push up-to-date pot files to that 
intermediate repo, which will update weblate's data. Weblate would push to that 
repo and any guix commiter would be able to download, check and commit new po 
files. No commiter would need to have write access to that repo: only the bot 
and weblate would use it. It could be on savannah or fedora's inhrastructure or 
somewhere else, but not in the guix namespace at savannah, because access 
rights are per-namespace iiuc.

This new process would allow for daily or weekly updates of translations, which 
fits better with our rolling-release model and will help translators of the 
manual do work on a regular basis instead of per-release. The interface is way 
more understandable for newcomers who will quickly understand how to 
contribute. The downside is, as always, more fragmentation in the l10n 
community esp. if we go for our own instance.

WDYT?