Empty translations on one side do not get translated by the other side

[Henning Eggers]

David Planella wrote:
> I first noticed that on this particular translation:
>
> https://translations.launchpad.net/synaptic/main/+pots/synaptic/ca/5/+translate
>
> Notice that I translated it in Ubuntu and I have permissions on both
> projects as part of the Catalan Ubuntu Translators and Catalan Launchpad
> Translators teams.
>
> Having translated it in Ubuntu, I would have expected that the
> translation would have been carried over automatically to Synaptic
> through message sharing, without me having to do the extra step of going
> to the upstream project and accepting it. This defeats the purpose of
> having more automation through sharing, as in this particular case, from
> the translators point of view, this is no different than having global
> suggestions and clicking on them, i.e. there is no advantage in message
> sharing. It's fine for a few translations, but not doable for e.g. 1000
> strings.
>
> That was my understanding of how this would work in previous discussions
> with Danilo. I discussed it with Henning on IRC the other day, and we
> agreed I should file a bug.

[Francis J. Lacoste (flacoste)]

Escalated by David Planella

[Данило Шеган (danilo)]

Whoa, indeed, this seems entirely broken! I first thought this was about not overriding empty translations which do exist in the DB, but no, this doesn't even override the case when there is no translation at all on the other side :(

[Данило Шеган (danilo)]

Ok, so here's my assesment of the issue:
 - the core functionality actually works (bar an edge case, see below)
 - migration was probably never done for direction ubuntu -> upstream; I can understand how this was skipped because one would have to check if the ubuntu translation reviewer is allowed to edit the upstream translation as well before setting it as current upstream as well; I doubt there are any definite plans to do this migration.

Solution to the migration problem is to download all the PO files from Ubuntu and re-upload them on the project (or if they are already in the source tree, just 'request one time import').

Corner case that'd still need fixing:
 - I got confused before reading the code about the severity, because the code is not checking for the LP permission (launchpad.Edit), so people with launchpad.TranslationsAdmin, even though they can translate anything, are not considered to be able to change the other side too (even though they can). This is a bug, but it affects a minor number of people, and is mostly just confusing (as a TranslationsAdmin, I won't usually translate Catalan, even though I did it on staging for the purposes of testing).

I'll modify the bug to be about this corner case (and lower the priority) instead unless someone objects and feels migration should be done across Launchpad, when we can re-evaluate.

[David Planella (dpm)]

After talking to Danilo, I understand that this is a data migration issue rather than a bug.

He's provided me some data about the projects affected (~50) and a workaround to mark the empty messages as shared (by exporting Ubuntu translations and uploading them in the upstream project), so I'm happy with lowering the importance of the bug.

[David Planella (dpm)]

I've just stumbled upon another case similar to what I reported some days ago as a question:

https://answers.launchpad.net/launchpad/+question/165196

In short, empty translations are not being shared, even after translating them. I'm not sure if this is related to this bug, but it has the same effect, so I thought I'd comment it here.