Tag: Fedora Project community

Translation is an important step in software localization which helps make software more popular globally, and impacts international user experience. In recent years, localization processes have been evolving worldwide to become more continuous, faster, efficient with automation. In Fedora, the development of the Zanata platform and its plugins, then Transtats, and now the migration to the Weblate platform are part of this common ongoing goal. The localization of a desktop OS like Fedora is highly complex because it depends on many factors of the individual upstream projects which are packaged in Fedora. For example, different translation timelines, resources, and tooling.

What is Transtats?

Transtats is a web application which tries to tie up upstream repositories, translation platforms, build system, and product release schedule together to solve problems of mismatch, out-of-sync conditions and to assist the timely packaging of quality translations. Actually, it collects translation data, analyzes them, and creates meaningful representations.

Fedora Transtats is hosted at https://transtats.fedoraproject.org/

How to see the translation status of my package?

Just select Packages tab from left hand side navigation bar. This takes us to the packages list view. Then, search for the package and click on its name.

For example anaconda. On package details page, locate following:

Here, we have translation statistics from translation platform: Zanata and Koji build system. Syncs with the platform and build system are scheduled, which update differences periodically. Languages in red color indicate that there are translated strings remaining in the Translation Platform to be pulled and packaged, whereas, blue denote translated messages could not make 100% in the built package.

String breakage (or changes?)

In translation of software packages, one of the challenges is to prevent string breakage. Package maintainers should strive to abide by the scheduled Fedora release String Freeze. However, in some circumstances it could be necessary to break the string freeze and to inform the translation team on the mailing list. As well as, to update latest translation template (POT) file in the translation platform. Just in case these actions seem missing – translators may get new strings to translate very late or the application may have some strings untranslated. In the worst case, an outdated translation string mismatch may result in a crash. Sync and automation pipelines are there to prevent this, nevertheless it depends on the push or pull methods followed by package developers or maintainers.

To deal with the same context, we can use a job template in Transtats to detect this string change – particularly useful after string freeze in Fedora release schedule. This would be really helpful for the folks who look for packaging translations without string breakage, keeping translation template (POT) file in sync with translation platform, and testing localized form of the application for translation completeness to back trace.

How to detect string changes?

One of the options in Jobs tab is ‘YML based Jobs’. Where we can see available job templates.

The jobs framework executes all the tasks mentioned in the YAML, create appropriate logs and store results. Track String Change job basically:

1. Clones the source repository of respective package.
2. Tries to generate translation template (POT) file.
3. Downloads POT file from respective translation platform.
4. And, finds differences between both the POT files.

Actually, Transtats maintains mapping of upstream repository, Translation Platform project and respective build tag for every package.

Let’s take a closer look into this YAML. We can provide value for %PACKAGE_NAME% and %RELEASE_SLUG% in the next step – Set Values! For example: anaconda and fedora-32. Furthermore, a couple of things seek attention are:

• In case the upstream software repository maintains separate git branch for fedora release, please edit ‘branch: master’ to ‘branch: <fedora-release-branch>’
• In ‘generate’ block, mention the command to generate POT file. Default one should work for ‘intltool-update’ only, however, many packages do have their own.
• A few packages may have gettext domain name different than that of package name. If this is the case, mention the gettext domain too.

As soon as the job is triggered, logs should be populated. If this is not a scratch run, a unique URL shall also be created at the end.

Left hand side is the input YAML and right hand side is respective log for each task. Here we can find the differences and figure out string mismatch.

In Transtats, we can create solutions to different problems in the form of job templates. And, scheduling of these jobs could be a step towards automation.

“It’s all 1s and 0s.” People say this when they’re making a joke or a sarcastic remark. When it comes to computers thought, it’s really true. And at the hardware level, that’s all there is. The processor, the memory, various forms of storage, USB, HDMI, and network connections, along with everything else in that cell-phone, tablet, laptop, or desktop only uses 1s and 0s. Bytes provide for the grouping of the 1s and 0s. So they are a big help in keeping them organized. Let’s looks at how they do that.

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Bytes are the unit of measure for data and programs stored and used in your computer. Though the byte has existed for a long time in computer history and has taken several forms, it’s current 8 bit length is well settled. Taken either singly or as adjacent groups, bytes are the generally accepted most common way the Bits in a computer are kept organized.

So what’s a bit? A bit is a binary digit; that is it can have only two values. In computers the two values a bit can have are zero (0) and one (1). That’s it, no other choices. A byte is just eight binary bits that are taken together to represent binary numbers. Through various coding schemes the numbers can represent a wide variety of other things like the characters we write with.

The table below shows a single Little-Endian byte showing individual bits of this byte and their associated powers of two. The decimal values of each power of two is show with each bit for reference. The line between Bit 3 and Bit 4 is where the  byte is sub divided into four bit groups called Nibbles. Little-Endian is a very commonly used byte format. Stay tuned for more on Endians. If you’re curious about the name, do a search on (etymology of endian).

One Little-Endian Byte:

	Bit0	Bit1	Bit2	Bit3	Bit4	Bit5	Bit6	Bit7
Power of 2	20	21	22	23	24	25	26	27
Decimal value	1	2	4	8	16	32	64	128

Each nibble of a byte can hold a four bit binary number as shown in the following table. If a bit is set to “1” that power of two adds to the value of the nibble. If a bit is set to “0” that power of two does not add to the value of the nibble. A byte which is two nibbles can hold a two digit hexadecimal number. Bits are really all that a computer can use. Programmers and engineers developing computer hardware use hexadecimal to make dealing with the bits easier. In the table below the least significant bit is on the left 2⁰, 2¹, 2², 2³

One Little-Endian Nibble:

Binary Number	Hexidecimal Value
0000	0
1000	1
0100	2
1100	3
0010	4
1010	5
0110	6
1110	7
0001	8
1001	9
0101	A
1101	B
0011	C
1011	D
0111	E
1111	F

I’ll explain Littel-Endian starting with a one byte diagram. The longer lines at the end of this frame are the boundaries of the byte so if you were drawing a group of adjacent bytes it would be clear where one byte left off and another began. The small lines divide the frame into individual locations where each of the eight bits can be shown. The medium line in the middle divides the byte into two equal four bit pieces which are the nibbles. Nibbles also have a long and varied history. I’ve never seen that they have been standardized. However the current well settled view is that nibbles are groups of four bits as I have shown them below. All of these lines only exist as people draw bytes. The lines don’t exist in the computer.

The Lower Nibble and Upper Nibble are labels as they would be used in a Little-Endian byte. In Little-Endian, the least significant digit is on the left end of a number. So the Lower Nibble is the least significant half of the number in the byte. Likewise the least significant bit is on the left LSBit (usually noted as LSB) stands for Least Significant Bit. and the most significant bit is on the right. The Upper Nibble on the right is the most significant half of the number. MSBit (usually noted as MSB) is the most significant bit. This is opposite to how we write decimal numbers with the most significant digit on the left. This is called Little-Endian because the “little end” of the number comes first.

With the byte being able to hold two hexadecimal digits, a byte can hold hexadecimal numbers between 00 and FF (0 to 255 in decimal) So if you are using bytes to represent the characters of a human readable language you just give each character, punctuation mark, etc. a number. (Then of course get everyone to agree with the coding you invented.) This is only one use for bytes. Bytes are also used as program code that your computer runs, numbers for various data you might have, and everything else that inhabits a computer in the CPU, memory, storage, or zooming around on the various buses and interface ports.

As it turns out there are two commonly used byte formats. Little-Endian has been used in the prior examples. Its feature is having the least significant digit on the left and the most significant digit on the right. If we were to write the decimal number 1620 in Little-Endian format it would be 0261.

There is also a byte format called Big-Endian. As you might expect it is opposite of Little-Endian with the most significant digit on the left and the least significant digit on the right. Like we write decimal numbers.

There are reasons for using both and the meaty reasons are beyond the scope of this article. However, Little-Endian tends to be used in microprocessors. The x86-64 processors in most PCs use the Little-Endian byte format. Though the later generations do have special instructions that provide limited use of Big-Endian format. The Big-Endian byte format is widely used in networking and notably in those big Z computers. Now you’re not necessarily limited to one or the other. The newer ARM processors can use either Endian format. Devices like microprocessors that can use both Big-Endian and Little Endian are sometimes referred to as Bi-Endian.

Well, sometimes you really need more than one byte to hold a number. To that end there are longer formats available that are composed of multiple bytes. For instance: The x86-64 processors Have Words which are 16 bits or 2 bytes that happen to be lined up next to each other head to tail, so to speak. They also have Double Words (32 bits or 4 bytes), and Quad Words (64 bits or 8 bytes). Now these are just examples of data forms made available by the processor hardware.

Programmers working with languages have many more ways to organize the bits and bytes. When the program is ready, a compiler or another mechanism converts the way that the program has bits and bytes organized into data forms that the CPU hardware can deal with.