What we are up to

News from development

Boy, the !WiHack is over for a while now and still no build-15 out. And we have been quiet too. Let's clean this up. We have big news for you all.

Move away from sourceforge

The first one is that widelands is moving away from Sourceforge. Sourceforge has done some steps to ensure they comply with the ridicule american rules. Those steps mainly mean that they block access to some projects on their site for countries that the United States considers as dangerous or criminal. This basically means that developers from (for example) Iran can no longer access work they've done on (for example) widelands, because our hoster (Sourceforge) is an american company and has to block access. You can read our discussion forum thread about this topic here: clicky. Sourceforge's statements are (for example) here.

Since no one of the core widelands team is an american citizen we do not feel obliged to follow their rules and laws. The correct choice therefore was to move away from sourceforge to a hoster that is not resident in the US and that offers us the same (or better) service. So we did: The Widelands project is in progress to move to Launchpad. Our new Project site is:

http://www.launchpad.net/widelands

The homepage is not hosted by sourceforge and will therefore stay accessible under the current address.

Launchpad & Translations

Launchpad brings a few nice technical novelties for our development process. The most important for developers is easy branching/merging by using another source code management system then SVN. This directly translates in a lower entry barrier for new developers. See our wiki page for an introduction to the new process (BzrPrimer) or take the launchpad guided tour; read especially the section about code hosting which explains the new concepts.

The second big novelty is web based translations. Launchpad allows us to upload translations directly from the focus of current development into the Web. Everybody with a launchpad account can now help translating widelands with nothing but their web browser. Launchpad offers nice statistics like the one shown in this image.

Translations made on the web are then imported back into the widelands source code by the developers.

How you can help to translate widelands

So this basically means that you have no excuse not to help translating widelands anymore ;). If you speak english and another language, consider contributing (if every unique visitor to this site contributes 3 translations, widelands will be 100% translated in less then two months). You can have your first translation done in 5 minutes. To do this, do the following:

1. Get a launchpad account clicky.
2. Start translating widelands here: https://translations.launchpad.net/widelands

You can read a more in depth tutorial with links to further reading in the wiki: TranslatingWidelands.

This wraps this post up. We hope to see many new translations in many new languages.

Edit: Status

Since posting this we got off to a good start. The slovak translation got pushed by Kefir and Ike, the French saw some work from Jean-Pierre Gemble, !NonSan and Immunoman and the Dutch translation were tackled by Pieter Ouwerkerk and Foppe Benedictus. Other translations have been touched. And the best thing: most of the editors are first time contributors to Widelands. Great people! Keep it up.

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