[Freecats-Dev] Tr: About Dan Urist's existing alpha/beta software

[Henri Chorand]

Hi all,

Please, all project team members and Dev list subscribers, your feedback is
welcome.


Cheers,

Henri Chorand


----- Message d'origine -----
De : "Dan Urist"
À : "Henri Chorand"
Envoyé : mardi 14 octobre 2003 07:00
Objet : Re: About your existing alpha/beta software


> Henri Chorand wrote:
>
> > So, if you feel like it, please forward me your Savannah login and I'll
add
> > you to the project team with full CVS management rights.
>
> Okay, I'm now registered in Savannah as durist.
>
>
> > Considering the problems associated with Sun's attitude towards free
> > software, I believe that, ideally, we should try to avoid being too much
> > tied to their tools.
> >
> > As I see it, the best would be to use your plug-in for the translation
> > client's interface, and then, beyond, to rely on other, fully free and
fully
> > portable tools. We thought about Python because of this (and its ease of
1°
> > learning, 2° mixing with other code).
> >
> > This means you would split your project into two parts:
> > - The OO interface, which will interest all the translators in the team
and
> > discussion list. You can expect some feedback on it.
> > - The "under the hood" part, which may evolve separately, possibly be
> > gradually rewritten in another language...
>
> This is already how it's designed. Currently, the front-end is a set of
> OOo Basic macros, which talk to a SOAP server written in perl. The java
> piece is the web-services extension for OOo; it has nothing to do with
> the server. OpenOffice uses java as its primary extension language;
> there is no way to get around that.
>
> Is java going to be a problem for hosting it on Savannah?
> There's a bit on the registration page
>
(https://savannah.gnu.org/faq/?group_id=11&question=What_is_the_registration
_process.txt)
> that says:
>
> No dependencies to non free software
>
> Your software may not depend on non free software. In order to be
> available to people who cannot use non free software, it has to be fully
> usable with the existing Free Software operating systems and programs.
>
>
> >>(...) There is nothing linux-specific about it and no reason it won't
> >>work on windows, it just needs to have a few paths tweaked, but I
> >>don't run windows at all so I can't come up with installation
> >>instructions for windows.
> >
> >
> > We should be able to help you on this. Once you provide us a detailed
Linux
> > setup guide, we should be able to produce a tested Windows version of
the
> > installation procedure.
>
> There is an INSTALL file in the distribution; but it's still fairly
complex.
>
> > As far as we can see it, fuzzy indexing and matching being all but an
exact
> > science, even a crude solution will be quite enough during prototyping
> > stages, and may evolve at its own path (adding "weird" (for Western
people)
> > languages is not forgotten).
>
> I think it also depends on how large a data set you're working with; a
> crude solution probably works okay until you have a really large
> translation memory. It seems to me that much of the value added by the
> better TM products is in editing convenience rather than linguistic
> cleverness. Currently my server uses a perl module called
> String::Similarity
> (http://search.cpan.org/~mlehmann/String-Similarity-0.02/Similarity.pm
> if you're interested in how it works); I have no idea how well it would
> scale.
>
> I hope to have an improved version of OOxlate out soon; I'm adding a
> generic RDBMS backend (it will still work with plain files, but will
> easily scale up if you stick a real database behind it).
>
> Dan
> --
> Daniel J. Urist