Polkit dialogs of snapd are not translatable

[AsciiWolf]

The polkit dialogs shown during snap installation/removal cannot be translated using Launchpad and are untranslated on non-English Ubuntu install. See the attached screenshot. Please, make the dialogs translatable.

[John Lenton (chipaca)]

How do other polkit-using projects do the translation?

[AsciiWolf (asciiwolf)]

Sorry, I don't know. Maybe someone from the Canonical desktop team will have more info about this.

[AsciiWolf (asciiwolf)]

For example Gufw (GUI for UFW firewall) has this in the polkit xml file:
<message gettext-domain="gufw">Authentication is required to run the Firewall Configuration</message>

[AsciiWolf (asciiwolf)]

The xml file should be also probably added to something like POTFILES.in. (Or maybe not, I am not an expert on Launchpad.)

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

I would think that the attached patch is what's needed to fix this.

Caveat: This is untested. The regular xgettext() would extract those .policy file strings fine, but I don't know if xgettext-go() does. If not, a slightly different solution is needed.

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

Submitting a second variant which makes use of xgettext(), but also this one is basically untested. I simply don't know how to build the thing. :(

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

xgettext() needs an applicable "rule" file to be able to extract strings from .policy files. The smoothest way to achieve that is to include policykit-1 in Build-Depends (not there currently AFAIK). policykit-1 provides /usr/share/gettext/its/polkit.{its,loc}.

[AsciiWolf (asciiwolf)]

Thanks for your great work! Feel free to let me know if you need help with something (testing etc.).

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Gunnar, do you think you could put a pull request on github for that change? That's where the snappy team is doing reviews, https://github.com/snapcore/snapd (feel free to ask on IRC if you need help with git or github)

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

Done. https://github.com/snapcore/snapd/pull/4723

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

@AsciiWolf: Second thoughts on your note here:

https://github.com/snapcore/snapd/pull/4723#issuecomment-369923663

Are there actually so many new translations in the upstream source to be imported? I see that the template in LP is dated 2018-02-20, which is fine.

[AsciiWolf (asciiwolf)]

As noted in the GitHub PR: It looks like that the translation sync with Launchpad is broken and the actual translations were last updated 5 months ago.

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

I digged a bit more about importing translations, and AFAICT it's a non-issue. Reason: LP *is* upstream. The .po files in upstream git consist of exported files from LP, and the latest sync happened last October.

https://github.com/snapcore/snapd/pull/4053/commits/f884b3ba

[AsciiWolf (asciiwolf)]

Ah, thanks for clarifying this. By the way, I see that the commits from your PR were merged only to the master branch, not to the 2.31 or 2.32 branches. Is this ok? I hope that the translated strings will be available in Ubuntu 18.04.

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

Don't know. I have assumed/hoped that 2.32 including those commits will make it into Ubuntu before the 18.04 release.

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

Sebastien let me know that a separate 2.32 PR is needed, so here it is:

https://github.com/snapcore/snapd/pull/4855

[AsciiWolf (asciiwolf)]

The snapd-2.32+18.04~pre5 package is now available in Ubuntu 18.04, but it looks like the polkit strings are still not available for translation on Launchpad. :-(

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

I know. New PR:

https://github.com/snapcore/snapd/pull/4885

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

This was finally fixed through the build of snapd 2.32+18.04.

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

New issue, though - bug #1758684