Waiting for your localisations to materialise

One of the more frustrating things for the localisers at translatewiki.net is the waiting. The waiting for the localisations to go life.

The work flow for internationalisation and localisation is as follows:

• Messages are importen from SVN into translatewiki.net
• The messages are checked and possibly improved
• The messages are made available for localisation
• The localised message are checked by the translationwiki.net developers
  
• The messages are submitted to SVN
• The messages go into production when MediaWiki is updated

The last bit is a bit of a bottleneck; updates happen when they do and the current 48811 revision has been in production for a few weeks now. This is not good for the motivation of the people that localise. So a mechanism is needed to make sure that the messages become available in a timely manner.

A new extension; "LocalisationUpdate" is being created that will make a difference. In its current incarnation it can be run either from a command line or it can be run a "cron job". This is going to make it possible to move the messages to production sooner. For the technical people, only those localised messages will be updated where the English message in both SVN and in the target MediaWiki installation are exactly the same.

The LocalisationUpdate will be first available for release 1.15 and the 1.16alpha. We hope to make it available for older releases at a later date.

A big thank you to TheDevilOnLine; he is realising this dream..
Thanks,
      GerardM