Translation support as a metainfo quality requirement

[bragefuglseth]

Now that Flathub supports showing translated metainfo for apps, I wonder if it would make sense to require basic metainfo translation support for being featured. For people who do not use English widely in their day-to-day lives, app metainfo being translated can make a huge impact on its perceived quality. Translation infrastructure is also mostly a technical endeavour, and requiring developers to at least make it possible to submit translations to the app metadata with .po files or a service like Weblate, doesn't seem unreasonable to me. The amount/coverage of translations shouldn't have anything to say as long as it's possible to contribute to them.

This is definitely not worth it if it requires a manual inspection for each app, though. Here are some ways we might be able to control it automatically:

• Checking if the metainfo file contains translations for at least 1 other language
• Searching for metainfo.xml and appdata.xml in the po/POTFILES list in the app's source code repository (only works for apps that use gettext)
• Checking if the metainfo file contains a valid "translate" URL
• Using the translation AppStream tag somehow

[razzeee]

IMO translation tooling is not good enough for this (or docs are that bad, that I just couldn't figure it out) - anyway it's not easy enough.

I'm unsure if weblate speaks the correct formats. https://docs.weblate.org/en/latest/formats.html

They hint at https://github.com/translate/translate to enable weblate to parse from/to, but likely that also needs work on their end.

translate/translate#5261

Then again, I'm not 100% if this is the correct approach.

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I'm stuck, as flathub uses weblate, I can't create a new project as my one free project is already used. So I can't explore this.

I created xbmc/xbmc#25298 to try to test this on kodis weblate instance (they got their own), but haven't spend more time on it. Cmake help would be great or somebody figuring out everything as an example somewhere else and documenting everything.

[bragefuglseth]

I'm unsure if weblate speaks the correct formats. https://docs.weblate.org/en/latest/formats.html

Weblate supports the gettext PO format, which can be used with XML files. But FWIW, handling translations with Weblate or similar services isn't strictly necessary; it can be done manually as well. Even that is a lot better than having no handling of it at all.

If Weblate is set up to handle PO translations, it commits to the po directory, but this can also be done manually, by having a po directory somewhere that people can submit pull requests to. For apps that have their metainfo in the manifest directory, I assume the po directory could just live in the same place. The metainfo.xml file could be renamed to metainfo.xml.in, and we could maybe even have a simple copy-paste GitHub action that regenerates the actual metainfo.xml file each time translations are submitted / updates the POT template and translation files each time the metainfo.xml.in file itself has been changed.

Apps that use something other than gettext can just roll with their solution as long as it works for the metainfo.

This is still highly technical, though, so I'm getting increasingly unsure if it's worth mandating.

[bbhtt]

This should not be enabled unless we have a large and diverse pool of apps passing the guidelines and the tooling/docs situation improves.

Automating the checking part is easiest, you can just check for the languages/lang tag for non en/C values.

The rest is complicated, as there is no clear documentation on appstream's side and the tooling is a bit lacking. Poeple often use their own python scripts using itstool to manage this. KDE has their own tooling for official apps for this.

Only meson allows to have translations in a nice way, for other buildsystems, without clear tooling, the metainfo file needs to be kept merged with the translated data.

[bragefuglseth]

This should not be enabled unless we have a large and diverse pool of apps passing the guidelines and the tooling/docs situation improves.

Agreed! From skimming through the store with Spanish enabled (which I assume is the largest non-English language in terms of translations), it seems like at least most apps built for GNOME and KDE do pass. I didn’t pay much attention to non-GNOME/KDE apps, but I assume there are a couple of those with metainfo translation support already.

The docs and tooling situation isn’t nearly as good at the moment, however. So that’s a pretty significant roadblock.