A few years back I created the irc channel #tradutores (translators in Brazilian Portuguese) on the Freenode server, a place where anyone involved with the translation process of open source software could hang out, chat, ask questions and share their experience with other fellow translators. A place with no association to a given project or distribution, where you could find people working for several groups such as GNOME, KDE, XFCE, Fedora, Foresight, Ubuntu, all sharing the same goal: improve the quality of open source translations for Brazilian Portuguese!
One thing that I have always felt a need for was a notification system for every time any given project had a commit related to Brazilian Portuguese translation. In other words, is someone committed new translations for Amarok, Totem, Firefox, or Thunar I wanted to be notified. One day I found out about CIA.vc, this huge aggregator of open source commits for lack of a better description. I imediately started using their services to follow commit messages for a couple of projects such as GNOME (the entire project, which gives me hundreds of messages on a daily basis) and even my pet project BillReminder. Soon after I added a bot to the channel #billreminder on Freenode to notify of every commit to the project, and life was good! But it wasn’t until last week that I read this post and found about about a cool feature that I had not yet explored: filters!
After many hours trying to figure out how to write the proper filter, I finally managed to create a new bot that would listen for commit messages that contained the word “Brazilian" in the log message. Why Brazilian? Because it is a common procedure to add the message "Updated Brazilian Portuguese…” in the log messages, which gave me a good way to filter out only the translations commit messages out of the many generated every day.
As you can see above, as soon as I committed my translations for the Dates program, my bot CIA-60 notified me of the event in the channel. :)
If you are involved with translating open source projects into Brazilian Portuguese, please stop by #tradutores on Freenode and introduce yourself. I’d love to hear about your ideas.