On 04/12/2012 Rob Weir wrote:
On Dec 4, 2012, at 1:46 PM, Ariel Constenla-Haile wrote:
having all language packs built, not advertising them on our website
(that said, note that the dev. snapshots hosted on people.apache.org are
advertised on the main download page ;) ). And the goal is to point them
to user when they ask, or list them on the porting page, or using them
for ongoing translation efforts, etc.
This is a very good idea. Actually, I probably proposed it myself on
ooo-l10n a few months ago... But I really think that this can be an
extremely useful resource for prospective translators, and for the image
of the project in general.
If we want something to be downloaded and used by the public then we
should release it, period. We should not be looking for clever ways
to avoid the important release steps of verifying IP, producing a
source package and voting on it. This is what it means to be an
Apache project.
We have plenty of ways to differentiate these from the packages we make
available from our download page: we could make a (monster-sized)
"multilingual build" instead of individual langpacks; we can rename the
product and make an "OOO-DEV" build; we can provide an "archive" build
(i.e., zipfiles with no installation).
I see the workflow this way:
- A user opens pl.openoffice.org and finds that Polish is not available
- A warning on that page takes him to a "Your help is needed" page
- This page provides information on how to help with translations in
general, plus a link to the "experimental build" above where the user
can see the current level of support for Polish
- Yes, someone might download the build and be OK with it, but we will
possibly gain translation volunteers, and they will be more motivated by
seeing in practice what "95% translated" means. And, of course, this
build will be very helpful for them when translating, so that they can
use it to see existing terminology and put untranslated strings in context.
The download page other.html would contain something like "If you don't
see your language here, help us to get it released!" and link to the
"Your help is needed" page above.
An important clarification: these sources have already been voted upon.
I can build the 3.4.1 sources from August with "--with lang=pl" and get
OpenOffice in Polish (well, 95% Polish and 5% English). So this is just
a build of OpenOffice 3.4.1 from the verified, voted and released sources.
Regards,
Andrea.
