With the gracious help of Ricardo Gonzalez, the Bloglines Toolkit now offers a Spanish translation! I also cleaned up a couple of little things in the package, like giving credit to the translation authors for their work and some mislocated data. If you’re using the auto-update feature, you should be prompted in the near future about this new version being available. You can also download it from the link below.
The real question now becomes: How should I handle the version numbers, when the only change is to add a language? For those happily using an existing language (for instance, English), they will be prompted for a new version, and can download it and install it and everything, but there is no real benefit to them in doing so.
Meanwhile, someone who uses English but would prefer Spanish would (I think) be happy to find that they now had an option available. I’d suspect that the former would be more numerous than the latter, but what do I know? I think I’ll probably just keep incrementing the version number each time a new language comes out. That way, even people who don’t monitor this blog will know, and be able to upgrade – they can always visit to check and see about the changes.
Comments
2 responses to “Bloglines Toolkit in Spanish”
That’s not a bad idea, and in fact is the way that I had it at first (separate English and Portuguese versions). The problem is that I had to maintain the code in both places. Not a big deal, I understand, but as the number grows, it means I have to copy that code to multiple locations and then package up those different versions, not to mention maintain separate update RDF files for each.
Packaging multiple languages into the same file allows the code itself to only exist in one place, and the locales to simply be added on top.
While the size of the extension does grow, I can’t believe that that number is significant. From the last English-only version, the size was 13KB. The size of the latest release, including three languages, is 18KB, providing a rough increase of 1.65KB per language. Unless the number grows completely out of hand, and we see 50 or more translations, I don’t know that it’s worth bothering with separate versions.
Still, I understand that it doesn’t make much sense to publish a new version of the same code, with a new version number, simply because of the additional language. I wish the Firefox auto-update was a bit smarter, and could have a change log of sorts, as well as the option to “ignore” updates – so if you see an update that is only a new language, you could simply mark it as “seen” and not be bothered again until a new update came out, which may or may not provide additional functionality.
One thing you mentioned intrigued me, but I’m not sure if I’m just reading it incorrectly or not – is it possible to package the language(s) for an extension as a separate extension? A sort of “language pack”, that somehow knows that it belongs to a particular extension? If so, that would be cool… but I’ve no idea how to do it. Pointers welcome.
Anyway, that was a rather long answer. Sorry about that!
Why not separate the language translations from the core code? Then any time you release a new language, or have updates to an existing one, you can simply publish that as a separate xpi?
The default install can include one or more languages while giving users the option to add the language of their choice. This has the added side-benefit of not growing the size of the plugin as you add new languages. Might make management easier long-term as well.