When adding language, translation import is not working without Update module enabled

I was wondering if I had my system misconfigured, such as a non-working tmp directory, but that is not the case. Still no idea what is happening.

Another piece of data is that admin/reports/translations reports "Nothing to check" when I check manually. ??!?

Some other things I looked at:
- On admin/config/regional/translate/settings the translation source is set to " Drupal translation server and local files" (I had not updated that setting).

Ahhhhh.... It looks like there is a dependency on the Update module being installed. I'm looking at locale.translation.inc in function
locale_translation_get_projects()

It does this:

  if (empty($projects)) {
    // Get project data from the database.
    $row_count = \Drupal::service('locale.project')->countProjects();
    // http://drupal.org/node/1777106 is a follow-up issue to make the check for
    // possible out-of-date project information more robust.
    if ($row_count == 0 && \Drupal::moduleHandler()->moduleExists('update')) {
      module_load_include('compare.inc', 'locale');
      // At least the core project should be in the database, so we build the
      // data if none are found.
      locale_translation_build_projects();
    }
    $projects = \Drupal::service('locale.project')->getAll();
 

So it looks like if you don't have the Update module installed, you don't get any translation imports. I don't have it turned on.

That seems wrong to me. Is that the desired behavior? If so it should be documented somewhere, like in the locale module help it should say that you can't import translations if the Update module is not installed.

Looking at the code, it appears that this is really an important dependency. When you are importing translations or checking if there are updates, you need to consider Core and all other Projects you've installed, so the Locale module depends on Update to get this information.

So probably the right fix is to document that the Update module is needed if you want to get any translations automatically from localize.drupal.org. In my opinion, we should add a note about this to:

a) The main locale_help() help topic page.
b) When adding a language, set a message if translations could not be imported because of this.
c) On the translation update status report. Or better yet actually that report should not be enabled if the Update module doesn't exist.
d) On the settings page for locale it should either not let you choose to use remote sources for translations, or it should at least tell you you need the Update module.
e) Other pages that depend on this? I am not sure, but there may be others.

Ok then on (c) on the Update Status report for translations, we should warn the user if Update module is not enabled that the Project list may be outdated.

Thanks very much for testing! It looks like we should mark this as a duplicate of that other issue then.