On Saturday 22 July 2006 11:17, Jens Seidel wrote: > On Sat, Jul 22, 2006 at 01:08:56AM +0200, Frans Pop wrote: > > Note that translations that are not sufficiently up-to-date will be > > excluded from the release. > > Great! It's really nice that you want as usual to drop all hard work > done by translators. Also as usual you do not even explain why. > But you're right, you're the release manager and can do whatever you > want, right!!?
I feel this whole mail is a ridiculous over-exaggeration triggered by a different discussion that is currently going on on the debian-boot list, but I will answer it anyway. > Once this is established for a beta release it will also apply to the > final version. In principle yes, but on the other hand I will, as a responsible release manager who cares about translations, allow a lot more time for updates and thus a longer freeze period. > What reason could exist for this? > * Releasing a version which is not fully translated and is XML-based > would contain old information, I really understand this. The current missing file for some XML-based translations makes that translation unbuildable. There have been some important changes in partitioning and preseeding since the last release. I _do_ feel that doing an official release where translations contain outdated information is a disservice to users. One of the main reasons to be a bit more strict for intermediate releases is to avoid a huge pile up of translation updates for the final release, so IMO this policy increases the chance that translations will be up-to-date at the time of the final release. Note that I did not list pt and it as "may be excluded" even though they have one untranslated document (the partman-crypto that was recently added). > * Releasing a PO file based translation with a single English sentence > in it is not the right thing for Debian users. Instead they should > refer to the English version (because they maybe have no way to > obtain the inofficial translation from Alioth). Who cares whether > they are able to understand English? I would hope that the translators do... > * Most probably the current document is nearly impossible to > understand if there are one or two untranslated strings in it. So I > suggest to drop the English version as well. Not everyone is able to > process in memory/brain such a huge document, which one only > understood if it completely parsed. We all know that the manual can be improved. If someone does not understand what a part of a manual is about, they are free to ask (as several people have done in the past; and they've even received answers). A translator is even free to not translate that part. If someone does decide to do that, I would suggest to discuss that with me so I can take it into account when writing these updates. For PO based translations the correct way to "not translate" a particular part of the manual is to copy the msgid to the msgstr. If you don't then I cannot distinguish between "outdated" and "not translated on purpose". > * We don't need any feedback for translations. Let's hide these so that > nobody (except the original translator) is able to improve it. If you want feedback, then you can get it based on the Alioth website as well as the released packages. I feel that users have a right to expect a released translation to contain the same information as the original and I feel that is more important than this point. > * There is no need to test the disk requirements of all translations!?? No, there is not. > Mhm, German is missing again ... That is because German is fully up to date. I do realize now that there is a discrepancy between the way I listed the XML-based translations and the PO-based translations. Sorry for that. > Please consider also the case the you're not able to complete the > manual before the final release because of personal reasons such as > illness. > > Clytie, how would you feel to miss your aim to support Vietnames again > in such a case? That is cheap. If there are personal reasons why a translation cannot be completed, the translator is of course free to reply to my "call for update translations" and discuss the situation. > > Note that excluded translations will still be available from alioth > > and can be included again for the next release. > > But they will only included again for the next release only if they are > fully translated, right? Yes. Or at least 100% up-to-date. > PS: Frans, just in case you want to revoke another users SVN access: My > account is jseidel-guest. Why should I want to do that?
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