On Xfce’s translation status in early 2018
As you might know I’m quite active translating Xfce to German. Furthermore I’m stepped up to take care for Xfce’s translations in general a while ago. Today I had a deeper look at the statistics of our Transifex dashboard and wanted to share the current state with you. This is both to appreciate the work done but so many volunteers but also to motivate you for helping out a bit.
Overview
In the end of 2017 we restructured the whole i18n process a bit, got rid of unused infrastructure and tried to lower the barrier for new translators to get into it. You can have a look at the corresponding wiki page if you’re interested.
As the whole translation work is pointed towards the ongoing development I will only cover the master branch. Parts of 4.12 and 4.10 are still available in Transifex but don’t get updated as they are already officially released.
NameNumbers dropping
Xfce’s translation team offers and takes care for 106 languages and variants all in all. There are 17 languages which are nearly fully translated, only missing 50 strings or (way) less. Five languages are at 100% at the time of writing: French, German, Malay, Polish and Russian. Looking at how active development is (yes, really!) and how much translatable strings the overall Xfce project has this is really impressive! People are doing an awesome job there and really deserve some praising words. Thank you!
Helping hands needed
Quite a handful of languages are on their best way towards offering full localization. At the time of writing they have a few hundred strings yet to do, so if you’re a native speaker or confidently speaking one these
Italian (it) 152 strings to translate
Danish (da) 273 strings to translate
Dutch (nl) 319 strings to translate
English (Australia) (en_AU) 373 strings to translate
Norwegian Bokmål (nb) 352 strings to translate
Serbian (sr) 387 strings to translate
Slovak (sk) 384 strings to translate
Bulgarian (bg) 460 strings to translate
Catalan (ca) 405 strings to translate
Croatian (hr) 523 strings to translate
Indonesian (id) 607 strings to translate
Japanese (ja) 605 strings to translate
Thai (th) 596 strings to translate
Furthermore there are languages a bit desperately missing help. Many of them are local variants which is why the translator teams are smaller. Nevertheless, they’re as important as any other language. Getting Free Software in general and Xfce in particular to less-spoken languages is one of it’s many strengths!
But how to get started?
The good thing with translation work is that it doesn’t need much time per default. Of course you can extend your efforts to many hours per day. But donating just half an hour every week helps a lot! Just imagine how many strings consisting of 2-3 words you could get done in that time.
Furthermore as mentioned earlier, translating has no technical entry barrier. When I started using Linux soon I wanted to contribute something. But being no developer I had to take a look around where to help. Doing translations was my first stop solution as it’s totally easy and intuitive. Now, nearly 15 years later, I’m still here and love doing this work.
To get into the language business is easy as one-two-three: make yourself familiar with the i18n docs, sign up at Transifex, request to join the Xfce team – done! It helps if you sign up at our mailing list and introduce yourself briefly, but it’s not necessary.
If you have questions feel free to ask on the mailing list or dive into IRC (#xfce-dev, Freenode). If you prefer you can also email or xmpp me directly, I’ll do my best to help you out.
Exo 0.12.0 Stable Release
With full GTK+ 2 and 3 support and numerous enhancements, Exo 0.12.0 provides a solid development base for new and refreshed Xfce applications.
What’s New?
Since this is the first stable release in nearly 2.5 years, I am going to provide a quick summary of the changes since version 0.10.7, released September 13, 2015.
New Features
GTK Extensions
- Added
exo_gtk_dialog_get_action_area - Added
exo_gtk_dialog_add_secondary_button - Added support for the “insensitive” state in
exo_cell_renderer_icon(GTK+ 3)
Helpers
- WebBrower: Added Brave, Google Chrome, and Vivaldi
- MailReader: Added Geary, dropped Opera Mail (no longer available for Linux)
Utilities
exo-csource:Added a new--outputflag to write the generated output to a fileexo-helper:Added a new--queryflag to determine the preferred application
ICONS
- Replaced non-standard gnome-* icons
- Replaced non-existent “missing-image” icon
BUILD CHANGES
- Build requirements were updated. Exo now requires GTK+ 2.24, GTK+ 3.22, GLib 2.42, libxfce4ui 4.12, and libxfce4util 4.12. Building GTK+ 3 libraries is not optional.
- Default debug setting is now “yes” instead of “full”.
DOCUMENTATION UPDATES
- Added missing per-release API indices
- Resolved undocumented symbols (100% symbol coverage)
- Updated project documentation (HACKING, README, THANKS)
Release Notes
Downloads
The latest version of Exo can always be downloaded from the Xfce archives. Grab version 0.12.0 from the below link.
https://archive.xfce.org/src/xfce/exo/0.12/exo-0.12.0.tar.bz2
- SHA-256: 64b88271a37d0ec7dca062c7bc61ca323116f7855092ac39698c421a2f30a18f
- SHA-1: 364a9aaa1724b99fe33f46b93969d98e990e9a1f
- MD5: 724afcca224f5fb22b510926d2740e52
MenuLibre 2.1.5 Released
With improved support for Budgie, KDE, and MATE desktop environments, MenuLibre 2.1.5 continues to provide one of the best menu editing experiences for the Linux desktop.
What’s New?
New Features
- Added support for the Budgie and KDE Plasma desktop environments
- Improved support for the MATE desktop environment (LP: #1529406)
- Window identification for the StartupWMClass key
General
- Added manpage for the recently added menulibre-menu-validate command
Bug Fixes
- Fix icon used when creating new directory (LP: #1744594)
- Use ‘applications-
other’ instead of ‘application- default- icon’ for better icon standards support (LP: #1745840) - Ensure categories are saved in the model when updated (LP: #1746802)
- Fix incorrect display of newly created directories
Desktop Environment Support
MenuLibre is a FreeDesktop.org compliant menu editor for desktop environments implementing the Desktop Entry Specification. Some desktops are improperly configured and do not export the expected variables, and patches are included to infer the running environment in other ways. Some older desktops, such as IceWM, do not implement this specification and handle their menus in other ways.
MenuLibre has been tested with and known to work with the following desktop environments: Budgie, GNOME, KDE (Plasma), LXDE, LXQt (limited support, LXQt does not allow for non-alphabetical menu ordering), MATE, Pantheon, Unity, and Xfce. It is known not to work with IceWM and others that do not implement the Desktop Entry Specification.
If you come across an environment that should be supported but does not work as expected, let me know! It may require some additional patches to properly detect the environment and menu prefix.
Development Status
With this release, MenuLibre 2.1 is now in feature and string freeze for the 2.2.x series. I’m hoping for a stable 2.2.0 release sometime this month. This means two things.
- Translators, now it’s your time to shine! There’s been quite a few changes in the past few releases and it looks like some localizations could use a bit of a refresh. Make your way over to the MenuLibre Translations page to get started or pick up where you left off.
- Everyone else, take MenuLibre for a spin, and report bugs! If you are able to conclude that one of the existing bug reports has actually been resolved, leave a comment on the bug report so we can clean it off the list. Check out the MenuLibre Bugs page for more.
Window Identification Demo
Downloads
The latest version of MenuLibre can always be downloaded from the Launchpad archives. Grab version 2.1.5 from the below link. Debian Unstable and Ubuntu Bionic users should expect to see this latest version land in the archives sometime this week.
https://launchpad.net/menulibre/2.1/2.1.5/+download/menulibre-2.1.5.tar.gz
- SHA-256: ef05b2722bab2acb7070d6c8ed0e7bd58bd4a4540bf498af9e889944f9da08b5
- SHA-1: e380478a369a3a45eafc6bb9408366bc41972d16
- MD5: efc7edb49bb0e5fea49e158b40573334