Translating Uyuni to your language

Introduction

Uyuni is developed in English first and for a long time it has been available only in English. Since Uyuni is a fork of Spacewalk, it inherited partial translations but as they were not maintained, they were disabled.

In mid-2020, SUSE started to reintroduce localization capabilities into Uyuni, per request of SUSE Manager customers.

Scope

A full translation of Uyuni comprises several "blocks":

• WebUI
• Command-line tools
• Documentation
• YaST module

Each of those blocks, in turn, comprises several pieces.

Plan for translation

It is important to note translating Uyuni is not an "all or nothing" effort: you may translate progressively.

First of all, you should identify who your target user is:

• Does he use mostly the command-line tools?
• The WebUI?
• Or maybe he would feel comfortable with using the WebUI and command-line tools in English, and he only wants the documentation to be translation?

Now that you know where to start, one piece of advice: prefer to translate full "blocks", i. e. do not translate a few pages of the WebUI, then some half the installation guide, then 30% of the core command-line tools "block". That kind of translation cannot be made available by default (and maybe not even shipped) because it's everything is incomplete. On the other hand, if you only translate the Installation Guide, that's a perfectly shippable translation.

How to translate

The source code of Uyuni is all hosted in git repositories, check this page for details: https://www.uyuni-project.org/pages/source-code.html

To make things easy for translators, we are using the openSUSE WebLate instance to translate Uyuni: https://l10n.opensuse.org/translate/uyuni/

Strings are pulled from git to WebLate, and pushed the other way around, every few hours in an automated process.

To avoid breaking WebLate because of merge conflicts, translating directly in the git repositories (i. e. a pull request to a GitHub repository which modifies target-language translation files) is NOT allowed. The only exception is translating screenshots, details in the documentation section below.

Translation components

What I called "blocks" earlier is called "components" in WebLate terminology. Let's dig deeper into them.

WebUI

As a consequence of the evolution of the Uyuni WebUI and the different technologies used, the strings in the WebUI are split into several WebLate components:

• java
• java database
• java jsp
• java nav
• java template
• web master

Command-line tools

• backend: backend tools required by any Uyuni Server: spacewalk-repo-sync, mgr-inter-sync, Oracle ULN authenticator, diskchecker, taskomatic, etc.
• mgr-daemon: Uyuni Server-side of the traditional client tools
• spacewalk-client-tools: client-side of the of the traditional client tools
• yum-rhn-plugin: another piece of the traditional client tools, specific to yum-based distributions (RHEL, CentOS, Oracle Linux 6 and 7)
• spacewalk-abrt: crash reporter. Do not translate, this will probably be removed soon.

YaST module

• susemanager: the YaST module to configure Uyuni after installation

Source

If you want to check where some string is used, you can find the code where these strings where extracted in the Ruby (.rb) files here: https://github.com/uyuni-project/uyuni/tree/master/susemanager/yast

Look for strings enclosed in the usuall "_" (underscore) gettext prefix, e. g.

Popup.Error(
Builtins.sformat(
_("The password should have at least %1 characters."),
7
)
)

Documentation

• docs ROOT: common elements to all documentation guides
• docs installation: Installation Guide. You should start here.
• docs upgrade: Upgrade Guide. Another must-have.
• docs client-configuration: Client Configuration Guide. Another must-have.
• docs retail: Uyuni for Retail specific bits
• docs salt: Salt Guide.
• docs administration: Administration Guide. Huge.
• docs reference: Reference Guide. Huge.
• docs quickstart-public-cloud: QuickStart Guide for Public Cloud. Short and provides useful information. You should translate it after the Client Configuration Guide.
• docs quickstart-sap: QuickStart Guide for SAP users. Short and provides useful information.
• docs large-deployments: Large Deployments Guide
• docs architecture: Architecture Guide. Do not translate, as it is still incomplete in English.

You can read the documentation in English in the Uyuni website: https://www.uyuni-project.org/uyuni-docs/uyuni/index.html

The Uyuni documentation is written in AsciiDoc format (source files here). Since neither WebLate nor any other translation tool supports AsciiDoc natively, we convert it to gettext (.pot/.po), submit it to WebLate and then do the opposite. Translated AsciiDoc is generated at build time, it is not stored in the git repository.

Screenshots

It is important to note all guides contain some screenshots.

At this moment, WebLate cannot manage "translation" of screenshots (i. e. taking a screenshot of the screen in the target language and replacing the screenshot in English), so the only way to provide "translated" screenshots is to create a pull request to the uyuni-docs git repository in GitHub.

This is the only case where translations are allowed outside WebLate.