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Turning Transifex to a True Upstream Project
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From time to time we’ve discussed Transifex with people from various other projects that showed interest to use it to solve their localization platform challenges (lots of users, lots of hosting platforms). Among these were people from Debian, GNOME, OpenSUSE, Gentoo and Wikipedia. A common point in the discussions was whether (or better, when) we were going to make Transifex a true upstream project™, one that is not specific to any distribution, with contributors across communities, roadmap and milestones targeting a broader audience, hosted on neutral ground, etc.
So far Fedora Hosted has been nothing but great as a hosting platform. The folks from Fedora Infrastructure really get it: as open source developers, we value a 100% open development platform, and with some support for the admin bits, we love being able to focus on development. My experience with FH has been great, and I’d recommend it to anyone wanting a free development platform for a small project.
Now, with me spending more time on Tranisfex lately and in the future, I feel more confident to start helping other projects have Trasifex on their infrastructure, produce releases more often, have it packaged in many formats etc. So I feel Transifex is mature enough to move on to the next level and grow as much as needed to be useful to other communities, projects (and why not companies) as well.
While moving to a hosted environment means a bit more work on administration, the benefits are many: more projects (users) on board, better control over the tools (eg. tweak Trac as needed), more hg repositories for branched development, more authenticated users on Trac, confident contributors and users, etc.
So, without further adieu, I’m happy to say Transifex development now has its own upstream space:
- http://transifex.org/ (home)
- http://code.transifex.org/ (repositories)
We now have a Trac instance and a Mercurial repo to play with (thanks Christos for some of the admin bits). Please do take a look at the pages and fire away suggestions or corrections. We haven’t setup Trac registration yet, so any contributor wanting a trac account, let me know with a password and I’ll manually add you right away. The GSoC students (blog post) will probably need these to create wiki pages and file tickets to track their progress.
The older Trac instance can be used to handle Fedora-specific bits and issues. As far as migrating the existing Trac data (tickets, mainly), instead of moving, I’m thinking of starting fresh and quickly hammering the older tickets in-place.
In addition to the move, we created the discussion group/mailing list transifex-devel for development discussions and patches. We also started hanging out at the IRC channel #transifex on Freenode — drop by if you’d like some more information on setting up Transifex to serve your translation community.
GSoC is approaching, and we’re so ready for it.
In other news, Fedora 9 is out and it feels very snappy and well polished. Awesome.


What can I say… Congrats!
Awesome! Keep up the great work :-)