translatable=no support for metainfo files

[yakushabb]

I'm not an expert on gettext or GTK-related topics, but I've noticed that several apps use translatable properties to mark UI strings as either translatable or not.

For example:

<property name="tooltip-text" translatable="yes">Copy</property>
<property name="title" translatable="no">PNG</property>

It appears that the metainfo files only support the translate="no" property:

One special case is the description block in MetaInfo files and release metadata. In MetaInfo files, each individual paragraph of a description (or enumerated entry) is translated individually, however, you can only exclude the complete block from being translated by adding translate="no" to the description element.

(Source: https://freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/sect-Quickstart-Translation.html)

I believe the usage of <description translatable="no"> is already accepted and used by many projects, as evident from GitHub repositories:

https://github.com/search?q=description+translatable%3D%22no%22+language%3AXML&type=code&l=XML

My assumptions are:

• The <description translatable="no"> usage is already accepted by many developers.
• The <description translatable="no"> usage is also well established across UI files.
• Changing translatable="no" to translate="no" offers no advantage for developers.
• Changing this usage may require additional changes for developers and translation platforms.

My suggestion:

• Developers could continue to use translatable="no"."

[ximion]

I will not change this. It would be a breaking change, which is absolutely not okay, and supporting both would give us no benefit other than an internal inconsistency in the AppStream specification with confused users as a result, in addition to making the implementation harder as well (as we would have to support both properties everywhere).

There is also no convention or standard for this anywhere.

AppStream uses imperative properties (scale, compare instead of scaling, comparison) for these kinds of things, which is why translate is also named the way it is.

Which leaves the GitHub search, which puzzled me a bit. Looks like that's due to the older appstream-glib project implementing something else, which is a bit unfortunate - but I think adding even more confusion by allowing more stuff in AppStream proper will actually make this situation worse, so I firmly believe it's a bad idea.
(fortunately that search picked up a ton of things that aren't metainfo files, so it's likely not was widespread as it first appears)

[yakushabb]

Thanks for answer. I will try to correct some projects that I have relations.

[ximion]

Thank you, that would help a lot! Updating xgettext to include the latest metainfo.its from this project would also be useful. I files a PR in the past, but meanwhile years later that one will already be out of date.
I'll have a look into that.
(updating xgettext would mean that this translation works even in appstream is not installed when the strings are extracted/joined).

[yakushabb]

Is it possible to include information or warnings about translatable="no" strings in appstreamcli?

Some developers might recognize the problem and fix it before it's reported by translators.