Translations are not loaded for the test descriptions in Checkbox

[David Planella]

Binary package hint: checkbox

This is a follow-up to bug 514401.

While now correctly translatable in Launchpad, the messages for the test descriptions in checkbox are always shown in English when launching the application.

That is, available translations are not being loaded.

As an application in main, and as per the Ubuntu philosophy (*), Checkbox should be available to everyone in their own language, hence I'm marking the importance as High in the ubuntu-translations task.

Here are some details of previous research
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/checkbox/+bug/514401/comments/17
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/checkbox/+bug/514401/comments/18

(*) Apart from the fact that we're losing many potential contributors to checkbox data submissions if they aren't able to read the test descriptions.

[Brendan Donegan (brendan-donegan)]

Confirmed and has to be High, especially with our current aims to get more people using Checkbox.

[David Planella (dpm)]

Thanks for setting the importance Brendan. Do you think someone from the Certification team could look at fixing this bug?

[Brendan Donegan (brendan-donegan)]

Hi David,

I think it will be very bad for the forthcoming Ubuntu Friendly program if we can't have testers with no English, so it should be addressed. I will let you know.

[Brendan Donegan (brendan-donegan)]

Looked at this for some time with David today - conclusions:

1.) Composite job definitions are the big problem:

 - Both descriptions need to be marked for translation (the description of the local job and the description of each individual job)
 - Having spaces at the start of the line breaks intltool so somehow these need to be gotten rid of (will potentially require changes in checkbox)

[Brendan Donegan (brendan-donegan)]

We may need to look at translating string literals in test scripts as well.

[Gabor Kelemen (kelemeng)]

After filing bug #868571, I played a little with this, and turns out I was wrong in comment #8 of bug 514401: the translations that used to be not loaded are loaded. Probably I forgot to discard former checkbox results, or I made something trivially stupid.

This was the good news, the bad news is this: one line long strings that are part of the test with the fixed multi-paragraph text, and used to be loaded, are not loaded anymore. For example, from jobs/usb.txt.in:

_description:
 USB HDD verification procedure:
 1.- Plug a USB HDD or thumbdrive into the computer
 2.- An icon should appear on the desktop and in the "Places" menu at the top of the screen.
 3.- Click Test to begin
 .
 If the test is successful, you should see the Yes radio button marked.

The first translatable part (before the single dot) was extracted without the line breaks, and its l10n didn't work, while the l10n of the one line text worked. After building checkbox with the fix in bug #868571, the situation is turned around, the long text is localized and the short one is not, see the screenshots.

[Gabor Kelemen (kelemeng)]

It may be worth noting that between the two text parts there is now two empty lines, not one.

[Gabor Kelemen (kelemeng)]

With the new description structure, this bug seems no longer be triggered in Precise. Setting this to Invalid for now.