LSR updates and translations

[Phil Holmes]

I've been having a think about how LSR snippets and the translations are 
managed in our build system.  At present, I understand the system works as 
follows.

We would start with a downloaded tarball of snippets, and run makelsr.py 
using that as an argument.  This takes the snippets from the tarball, 
searches /Documentation/lang/texidocs for a matching translation, and if it 
finds one, adds it to the snippet after the lsrtag entry.  It also runs 
convert-ly to update the snippets, and runs lilypond in safe mode to check 
for possible system commands.  It then writes the resulting file into 
/Documentation/snippets.  (There's a little added complication over 
snippets/new, but I'm glossing over this for now).

Later on, when new translations have been added or we want to make general 
updates, we can run makelsr in "local" mode - i.e. without a tarball as an 
argument.  This looks in /Documentation/snippets/ for existing snippets, 
finds out if there are existing translations in the snippet, and looks in 
/Documentation/lang/texidocs for new translations.  If it finds new ones, it 
adds them to the snippet (in the wrong place, as it turns out).  Currently 
I'm not sure what happens if a translation has been updated, but may find 
out later today.  It then runs convert-ly and writes the updated snippet 
back to /Documentation/snippets/.

I'd like to propose a pretty radical change to this process.  I propose that 
/Documentation/snippets/ is a straight copy of a recent LSR tarball.  It's 
the task of the LSR meister to keep this up to date.  We have a new 
directory: build/Documentation/snippets.  This is created and updated with a 
new make command - "make snippets" (which is run before make doc, or 
possibly make). make snippets runs an updated version of makelsr, which runs 
in the makelsr-with-argument mode - i.e., searches for snippets in 
/Documentation/snippets/, adds the translations, runs convert-ly, and saves 
the results in /build/Documentation/snippets.  It therefore becomes a 
transient collection and does not require monitoring for translation 
purposes.  The only thing that translators need to monitor is 
/Documentation/snippets/, which should not change except when new snippets 
are added or existing ones changed.

It's a task of the LSR-meister to ensure that all snippets in 
/Documentation/snippets/ do not have dangerous system commands.

How does this sound as an outline?  I'd like thoughts from Graham, John 
Mandereau and some translators as to whether this would work, but it seems 
to me a better general plan, and more in keeping with the idea the rest of 
the build system uses - i.e. relatively static source, and often updated 
build results.

--
Phil Holmes