On 12/4/12 10:56 PM, Andrea Pescetti wrote: > 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.
I am not sure if we really have updated all sdf files for all languages or only on demand for the languages we planned to release. Before we build all languages and put them in whatever space we should verify this and and should of course do a minimal test (build verification test or something like this) on these languages. Who will do that? I am personally are more motivated to support interested volunteers with their tongue language when they are willing to help. And I believe that when we include new languages on demand only in our dev snapshots when we see active volunteers interested doing the translation it is the better approach to motivate people. Look for example Arabic, we include it in the first release because we thought it is important. We had some new error messages to translate but no volunteers. Ok we probably didn't tried enough to find them but it was and is dangerous in general when we don't have communities behind a language. What should we do for a new release with more UI changes that needs translation, drop the languages again? I am in favor of keeping the current approach and include new languages only on demand when we see an active translation community (at least one person able to make changes ;-)) For AOO 4.0 I will definitely update all languages to solve some already existing changes in the resources and I expect more. But for 3.4.1 I have no plans to change anything here. In the future when we have 100% known state I can think of one multi-language binary for testing and verification of languages. Juergen > > Regards, > Andrea.
