i18n: Remove wesnoth-ai textdomain

[irydacea]

Currently, Wesnoth ships with a whole textdomain dedicated to localized strings revolving around the game's AI engine and the AI demos/test scenarios. As of the current master branch tip (84ab060), the string count for this textdomain is 378.

The problem is that other than a few strings near the start of the catalogue template, none of the other strings have any value for regular players since they are sourced from AI demos/test scenarios in data/ai/micro_ais/ and data/ai/scenarios/. None of them will be displayed to people who aren't tinkering with WML or contributing to AI development as part of the Wesnoth dev team, and some of the language used in them is very technical in nature.

Since version 1.14.0, translated string count is used to determine whether a translation should even be listed in the Language menu to players by default, so it's not an option for translators to skip strings that dont' crop up in normal gameplay. The majority of the textdomain thus constitutes unnecessary workload for translators (especially so for new translations and abandoned translations in need of extensive review). In my experience as the former maintainer of the Spanish translation in 2008/2009, every single string counts when you're pressured to reach 100% string count before the first gold release of a new stable series.

Thus my proposal is to move the strings that actually have some relevance to the user to wesnoth or wesnoth-lib (ignoring for a moment the fact that both of these textdomains really ought to be either merged or shuffled around) and exclude the rest of the sources of the wesnoth-ai textdomain from wmlxgettext passes. This can be done in master and optionally backported to stable if it's deemed to be a low-risk change.

[stevecotton]

I couldn't find this on the wiki roadmap, so have added it to 1.15.10 (and assigned that to myself on the wiki).

If anyone wants to do it earlier, please feel free to reassign it.

[stevecotton]

AFAICS, the strings to move to wesnoth or wesnoth-lib are exclusively the ones that start Multiplayer_AI^.

data/ai/ais/ai_default_rca.cfg:    description=_"Multiplayer_AI^Default AI (RCA)" # wmllint: no spellcheck
data/ai/ais/ai_default_rca_1_14.cfg:    description=_"Multiplayer_AI^1.14 Default AI" # wmllint: no spellcheck
data/ai/ais/ai_experimental.cfg:    description=_"Multiplayer_AI^Experimental AI" # wmllint: no spellcheck
data/ai/ais/idle_ai.cfg:    description=_"Multiplayer_AI^Dev AI: Idle AI" # wmllint: no spellcheck
data/ai/dev/ai_default_rca_alternate_recruiting.cfg:    description=_"Multiplayer_AI^Dev AI: Default AI (RCA) with Alternate Recruiting" # wmllint: no spellch
eck
data/ai/dev/formula_ai.cfg:    description=_"Multiplayer_AI^Dev AI: Default + Experimental Recruitment (Formula AI)" # wmllint: no spellcheck
data/ai/dev/formula_ai_poisoning.cfg:    description=_"Multiplayer_AI^Dev AI: Default + Poisoning (Formula AI)" # wmllint: no spellcheck

Each of the files above has exactly one translatable string, which is the one we want to keep.

Other observations

There are many languages where both Multiplayer_AI^1.14 Default AI and Multiplayer_AI^Default AI are translated to the same string (without the 1.14).

Many languages have ancient fuzzies for these strings in the wesnoth text domain, but with the translation of "Multiplayer". Moving the strings to wesnoth-lib instead of wesnoth would avoid involvement with that.

IIUC, the wesnoth-ai textdomain doesn't contribute to the stats on whether a translation is complete enough to be shown without --all-translations. I think that's limited to only these sets:

wesnoth/po/CMakeLists.txt

Line 173 in f74ff15

--textdomains=wesnoth,wesnoth-editor,wesnoth-help,wesnoth-lib,wesnoth-multiplayer,wesnoth-tutorial,wesnoth-units

wesnoth/po/SConscript

Line 94 in f74ff15

env.Alias("pot-update", "../translations", "python3 utils/po_stat.py --update-cfg --textdomains=wesnoth,wesnoth-editor,wesnoth-help,wesnoth-lib,wesnoth-multiplayer,wesnoth-tutorial,wesnoth-units")

However, I fully agree that we shouldn't be asking translators to translate the current contents of wesnoth-ai.

[AI0867]

Other observations

There are many languages where both Multiplayer_AI^1.14 Default AI and Multiplayer_AI^Default AI are translated to the same string (without the 1.14).

1.14 Default AI isn't the clearest string, so it may be a good idea to replace it. Would Old Default AI (version 1.14) fit in the dropdown?

[stevecotton]

Looks great in English, and not bad in a longer language:

[CelticMinstrel]

Would Old Default AI (version 1.14) fit in the dropdown?

Looks great in English, and not bad in a longer language:

In fact, it looks like length isn't really a concern as the dropdown will just expand to fit it… assuming of course that the expand-to-fit behaviour isn't itself a bug, which it might be…