Unproductive start for a week

Well, maybe unproductive is a bit overstatement, but considering I didn’t advance much in my summer project it wasn’t very productive either.

Anyway, on Monday the internet connection was down for good number of hours. I got fed up with it and started cooking! I don’t usually cook to myself, so I’m not very good at it. It was tasty however, giving courage to do it more often. I spent the rest of the day playing Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri with the extension disc. I love that game!

Oh, and FreeCol 0.7.4 was released yesterday (Monday). It didn’t go as well as I hoped. I was unable to commit latest changes done after Sunday before the release, because the connection was broken. I hope there wasn’t too much effort put into it after Sunday. Now that 0.7.4 is released and the branch officially dead, we have to finally migrate to the 8-branch. Most of the preparations have been already done. I wrote a script that tries to guess key mappings and other changes. So I have the list. In few days we will rename all FreeCol messages, changing to own namespace for FreeCol, removing the prefix and renaming old keys to new names. Keys have to be fixed in the files also. Except a short downtime when it is not possible to translate FreeCol while we do these changes.

And then Tuesday. On Monday Tim Starling committed a change to MediaWiki code that moved files around. (Tim is btw my summer project mentor, but this is unrelated). There was short breakage when Siebrand tried to update the code normally, and it was quickly reverted. Today I committed most of our local changes again: fix to comments; special page normalisation try 2; rewrite or Special:RecentChanges to add few hooks etc. I don’t know how many bugs I introduced yet again, but let’s hope not too many. Thanks to Ialex who already fixed few.

After that I put Betawiki into maintenance mode and started updating and merging changes. It really didn’t help that my local shitty Internet Service Provider had 35% of packet loss while doing it… ssh was irritatingly slow. I managed to do it in less than 10 minutes, and now we are back running, with less local changes.

Rest of the time was spent on eating (the same food as yesterday) and fighting with the papers to put an application for a new place… I have to get away from the dorm before my head explodes. For the evening I probably have to read up about XLIFF format to implement support for it, or test the Gettext implementation, or write some documentation for it, or something else… who knows.

As grain of salt, some nice features (or something like that) we got last week:

  1. Possibility to count fuzzy messages in group statistics
  2. Possibility to hide languages that have no translations at all
  3. First pieces of Gettext plural support
  4. Ability to blacklist some authors from the credits (mainly for bots or us who do maintenance like work)
  5. FreeCol got lots of optional messages
  6. Improvements to the RecentChanges filters that got implemented in the previous week and finally committed to svn repository today.

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