Mailing List Archive

On May 18, 2010, at 1:42 PM, Aaron Fuleki wrote:

>> http://github.com/bricoleurs/bricolage/tree/dev_ics
>
> I just started reading through the diffs, but for those of us who aren't bric/perl ninjas, how exactly did input channels work?

The UI was not developed as part of the project, only the back-end (database and API). But the idea was that you could have multiple input channels in a document. The primary use case is multi-language documents. So the default input channel for a document might be English, but then you could switch over to the French input channel and have the same document in another language. The first time, it would copy over the English content, but then you could translate it into French. Then you have one document in two languages. Switch back to the English input channel and the English is still there.

This was to be the killer feature for Bricolage, and pretty desirable for sites like who.int. But since Marshall finished the back-end code in 2005 it hasn't been touched, alas. To get it working, the back-end code would need to be brought up-to-date, migrations and SQL scripts for MySQL added, and then the UI implemented. No one has has the tuits or offered the funding to get it done, however. I would expect the UI to be a pretty fair amount of work to get right. It'd be a killer feature, though.

Best,

David

Hi,

> This was to be the killer feature for Bricolage, and pretty desirable
> for sites like who.int.

This was a year or two ago, so my recollection might be a bit fuzzy, but
I think what also needed to be done to make input channel useful for
who.int was to make it so that you can have multiple checkouts of the
same story. It was very common for translators to take a while to get
their translation done and to have a story checked out and locked
waiting on translation wasn't workable.

So multiple check outs I think would be a pre-req here (and useful in
it's own right besides translations).

Cheers,

Alex

--
Alex Krohn <alex@gossamer-threads.com>

On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 7:18 PM, Alex Krohn <alex@gossamer-threads.com> wrote:
> This was a year or two ago, so my recollection might be a bit fuzzy, but
> I think what also needed to be done to make input channel useful for
> who.int was to make it so that you can have multiple checkouts of the
> same story. It was very common for translators to take a while to get
> their translation done and to have a story checked out and locked
> waiting on translation wasn't workable.

Yes, ideally there wouldn't've been any checkout,
so different editors could work on the same document,
with versioning/conflict resolution as in git or svn.

Another problem we had (ultimately) was that they didn't
want different language-versions of a document to necessarily
even be the same - that is, they wanted to develop them independently
(back to the idea of developing different input channels simultaneously).
For example, it might not make sense to use the same number
of paragraphs in a Chinese version (which is much more compact)
than the Russian version (which has long words). Or it might be
that editors want to emphasize different things for different languages:
tuberculosis has different issues in China than in France.
In other words, they didn't really want the different language versions
to be same document after all.

On another topic, it seems Perl is issuing new releases at a rate that is making my head spin. How long was 5.8.8 the most recent branch? And now 5.12 . . .1!

It shouldn't be an issue, but has anyone tested it?

-Matt

I went into the bug tracker tonight and submitted or reopened tickets for several of the improvements that there seems to be consensus on. It sounds like we need to figure out what we want to do about the Word importation and the input templates (which I'm still not sure I totally get, but that may be my own issue). I'll take a look at the Word stuff when I get a chance, but haven't yet.

-Matt

On May 20, 2010, at 7:04 PM, Matthew Rolf wrote:

> On another topic, it seems Perl is issuing new releases at a rate that is making my head spin. How long was 5.8.8 the most recent branch? And now 5.12 . . .1!
>
> It shouldn't be an issue, but has anyone tested it?

Yes. All fine.

David

On May 20, 2010, at 11:44 PM, Matthew Rolf wrote:

> I went into the bug tracker tonight and submitted or reopened tickets for several of the improvements that there seems to be consensus on. It sounds like we need to figure out what we want to do about the Word importation and the input templates (which I'm still not sure I totally get, but that may be my own issue). I'll take a look at the Word stuff when I get a chance, but haven't yet.

Input Channels are unlikely to happen without sponsorship. Dunno about Word importation: it depends on what WHO wants, I think.

Best,

David