Is this repo alive?

[ecarreras]

This repo seems dead, the last commit is from 7 months ago, and it only adds a new language... I see that transifex.com is so differnt from the version of this repo? Seriously all the development of transifex is done here?

The release cycle[1] is also outdated, the last version that I can see is 1.2.1 [2]

We can see the repo network[3], and there is some people doing commits and working on it. Some of they are:

@pejakm @fazakis @tymofij @soslan @Lockal

Why not create a main community edition fork? and send back pull-requests to official transifex repo?

[1] http://help.transifex.com/server/releases/index.html#transifex-releases
[2] http://help.transifex.com/server/releases/1.2.html#transifex-ce-1-2-1
[3] https://github.com/transifex/transifex/network

[soslan]

I do support you. Moreover I think we should create something independent and really open.

[ecarreras]

In fact, we are thinking to move to another platform, and we are evaluating it. It seems really open and has much more activity. We love Transifex, but this is not the path...

[pejakm]

Well, there's a 102 issues in the tracker, nobody bothers to take a look. Forking seems logical step forward.

[tymofij]

They have not only stopped pushing things here, but also changed their development model from "Transifex CE + proprietary addons = Transifex.com" to having one big integrated internal repository. Chatlog here tymofij/transifex#1 (comment)

And even before that, for the couple of years that I am aware of, the project was not truly opensource: it was steered and driven by employees, the intentions were never clear and decisions were announced after the deed, if ever. Also, important things like localizer dashboard or messaging system were never opensourced.

I have my own fork, but I feel very lonely with the amount of work pending. Like fixing the tests, migrations, requirements and updating the code to Django 1.5. Working in a team would be great.

Question is, would legacy TX code be worth it. @ecarreras - what is that other platform you are considering?

[ecarreras]

@tymofij the platform is weblate[1], it seems that have a lot of activity[2], it is also in Github and written in Python 👯

Another interessant features are git integration, and github hooks, we are still entering on it.

[1] http://weblate.org/en/
[2] http://www.ohloh.net/p/weblate
[3] https://github.com/nijel/weblate

[glezos]

Hi all,

Let me shed some more light and share some of the events which led to the current status.

Events so far

The Transifex team was and still is committed to open-source. Tx was born in the open-source community and we're really happy to be able to offer a hosted version of Tx for free to open-source projects. Just like Github does. Very few open-source-born teams evolved to a point where they can do this, and I'm proud we are one of them.

The way we developed Tx in the past was to have everything in the open-source repo and maintain an "addon" which changed the theme, added paid plans and a bunch of Txcom-specific optimizations. With time we developed some features which are only useful for big, paying companies such as deep analytics on the TM usage per user etc.

With time, maintaining this code setup proved to be harder and harder. The code was ugly and painful to maintain. It was hard to code new functionality, especially in the UI, and debugging was a mess. Coding was actually not fun at all in certain areas. Just adding a button on a menu required hacking. We ended up spending more time working on loosely-coupling everything than actually working on useful features for the users.

In the meantime, more and more projects decided to come to Transifex.com instead of maintaining their own instances (eg. Fedora). The same happened with companies which considered Transifex CE. After a while, for the open-source projects, I think only XFCE had its own actively used, customized instance of Tx, a version from 2010, which did not follow the current development. For most people, Transifex.com seemed to work very well.

At some point it became obvious that we've been spending so much time on a repo which was hardly used by anyone instead of focusing on the product which almost everybody used. We also found out that these issues bothered the vast majority of the companies which operate an open-source-friendly web service.

The change

GitHub is a great example of a product which fully supports the community but without the troubles we had. While they operate with a closed product, they have a bunch of libraries open-source, they develop all the features the community needs and offer a free plan for public projects. Maybe it's the case with SaaS apps, I'm not sure.

So we decided to give it a try and see how it goes. The decision was engineering-driven, not business-driven. All the engineers on our team are open-source believers and being open-source had a huge positive effect on the company. We had no issue whatsoever with our competitors looking at our code. On the contrary, it gave us a huge edge and confidence with our customers they could never have had.

The plan was to clean up a lot of things in the code and focus on improving the product in many areas with a clean mind and repo. The results were amazing: the past few months we've improved the product more than the last 1.5 years. Just look at the new editor as an example. In fact, with the move, we were able to answer more requests by the community because we could code faster. We were able to invest time extending the API, which made it even easier to work with the service.

In the past we were doing one release every 3 months, now, we're doing 3 every week. I was curious about the diff, so I generated this from the GitHub charts that compares this repo with the combined (Txo+Txc) one.

Since last year, we've had 2x more projects and 3x more users. There are over 6.000 projects nowadays, which is pretty amazing.

The future

The next step would be to open-source many of the libraries we use, such as django-events, our file importers and a few other elements which can actually be re-used by other open-source projects and be actually useful for patches and pull requests.

We will continue to work hard to make sure Transifex is an amazing product. The current plan is to continue doing this on the new, combined, closed repo. If you feel there's an important feature missing which needs to be in the product, just let us know. If you're looking to add some major piece of functionality and are a student, contact us and we might be able to get you an internship to work on it.

Concerning this repo, there is still very, very little interest from the community for us to continue actively maintaining it. If you feel otherwise, this repository will be available to anyone who wants to hack on it. Fork away, and twist our arm to contribute to your fork. :-)

Summary: Maintaining both an open-source repo and Transifex.com was becoming much harder with time and 99.9% of projects were hosted on Transifex.com anyway. We decided to switch to a GitHub model where we work on one non-open codebase and open-source the libraries which are actually useful for others.

[patcon]

This is pretty disappointing, to be honest.

[sembrestels]

You are closing the product because nobody were using it in the wild? Maybe the most people were using transifex.com, but there were people using transifex.com becasue it was free software.

And transifex live is patent-pending and you say that your team are open-source believers...

I'm very disapointed, and I'm not going to recomend transifex to anybody more.

Moving to https://hosted.weblate.org/