Recommendations
Lunaria was made with the goal to help open-source communities tackle complex localization projects, but tools alone are only half of the way.
This page lists our recommendations towards improving your project’s day-to-day to better utilize Lunaria and improve the lives of your contributors and maintainers.
Prefer squashed merge commits
Lunaria’s git-powered tracking system considers every commit by default. If several commits are merged into your main branch, each one of them and its changed files might take different statuses based on their titles and other metadata used.
For this reason, squashed merge commits are a good way to keep Lunaria’s tracking system predictable, by having status changes happen on a per-pull request basis, instead of per-commit.
Keep pull requests small
On highly active projects with constant changes, it might start to become hard keeping track and checking if localization PRs are not missing any content from the source when the original content changed while the PR was still in review.
By making small changes per-pull request, not only this eases the task of tracing back any missing changes as it also makes it more welcoming for reviewers to jump in and ensure the quality of the localized content.
Instruct your community
Several possible contributors might not be used to Lunaria, contributing on open-source projects, or even both! For that reason, it’s of utmost importance documenting your whole process, ensuring new contributors don’t feel frustrated, or maintainers have a hard time guiding these contributors into being helpful.
The Astro Docs’ internationalization guide is a good example you can take as reference. Overall, your localization documentation should mention most of these topics:
- What are the requirements to get started? (tools, prior experience, etc.)
- What is the localization structure? (where is the content, how X or Y is localized, etc.)
- How can contributors to help? (where help is most needed, how to find something to contribute, etc.)