A way to group translation changes in fewer commits

[jepler]

I wish it was possible for weblate to create fewer commits than one per msgstr change.

Our 9-year old project has about 11000 commits. Our ".pot" file currently has 2647 messages. That means that fully translating just 5 languages with weblate will create more commits than the entire rest of the project! (even more, since weblate will be creating commits on 'maint' and 'master' branches and then we'll double the length of the history when merging 'maint' into master!)

I don't know what the implementation would be like, but for example all changes by the same author without a pause longer than 15 minutes could be placed in a single commit.

[nijel]

I've though quite a lot about this and it's quite tricky. With current approach, it is really simple to merge translations back and you don't have to care about anything. With some sort of merging things could get more complicated (once merging of commits would involve rewriting git history).

My current idea to handle this is to postpone committing changes as long as possible. This way Git history won't get rewritten (what would avoid troubles when merging changes).

So basically it would be like:

• on translation done it would be stored to file
• the commit will happen later once
  • somebody else works on the translation
  • merge from upstream occurs
  • optionally some timeout, though upstream merge will probably happen often enough

With current Weblate infrastructure this is quite easy to implement and would reduce number of commits lot. Though this would not be 100% merging of all contributions from single translator, what would be really hard to achieve.

[nijel]

Implemented in Git as outlined above.