[Mediawiki-i18n] Advice on migrating and renaming translation keys

[Jon Robson]

> For future, there is a feature request to automatically detect and handle
renames (within a repository) during the synchronization to
translatewiki.net

This does sound promising. Is there a task I can track? I'd like to do this
rename at some point, but there is no urgency so waiting on this seems
sensible.

On Sun, Aug 6, 2017 at 8:49 AM Niklas Laxström <niklas.laxstrom at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 2017-07-20 22:33 GMT+03:00 Jon Robson <jrobson at wikimedia.org>:
>
>> MinervaNeue contains various message keys prefixed with mobile-frontend-
>>
>> https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki-skins-MinervaNeue/blob/master/i18n/en.json
>>
>> I'd like to move away from this as it's confusing.
>>
>> Nemo pointed out that when Cologne Blue was moved out of core no messages
>> were renamed.. but then none of those were prefixed.
>>
>> My concern is that leaving these message keys in Minerva adds confusion
>> and inconsistency for developers and translators about where the messages
>> are used and sourced from. It also means that new developers are likely to
>> prefix new message keys with mobile-frontend- and that will lead to
>> unnecessary review.
>>
>> My preference would be to take the short term pain of renaming all
>> message keys from `mobile-frontend-` to `minerva-` for the long term
>> happiness.
>>
>> Is there any strong reason not to do this?
>>
>>
> As a general rule of thumb, renaming message keys that are in use is
> disruptive and should be avoided.
>
> To rename message keys, you should coordinate with translatewiki.net
> maintainers. Raymond takes care of MediaWiki core and extensions. The
> ideal[#] process is:
> 1) make a patch to rename message keys in en.json and qqq.json (optionally
> also all language files, though this is not necessary)
> 2) when that patch is merged by translatewiki.net maintainer, before the
> next sync to translatewiki.net all the translations are renamed in
> translatewiki.net (with a bot or Special:Replacetext) to preserve
> translation histories
> 3) a full export[*] is made to update translation files (which will
> automatically update per the renames) and pushed to the repository
>
> [#] For future, there is a feature request to automatically detect and
> handle renames (within a repository) during the synchronization to
> translatewiki.net
> [*] Regular export skip languages with no recent edits to speed up the
> process. Full export unconditionally exports all languages that meet the
> export threshold.
>
> There are other considerations such as local customizations of those
> messages in the wikis, which I skipped in this explanation.
>
>   -Niklas
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>
-- 
Jon Robson
Senior Software Engineer
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