On 04/12/2012 Rob Weir wrote:
We should introduce a disconnect here, to avoid 1 million uses in Poland ignoring your easily ignored caveat and overwhelming the people.apache.org server.
This specific issue has now been solved by invoking policy (so, we will be able to put builds on people.apache.org but we won't link to them from the main website), but the problem is not here. The problem is that we have had a Polish translation ready for months and that we haven't released it yet (even though recent improvements are really huge and will allow to avoid long waits in future).
In general, and coming back to the main thread topic, if we have millions of people who look for a certain language, we can find volunteers for that language, and your brilliant idea to put notices on the native-language websites proves it. So the problem is how to use our volunteers effectively and motivate them. Ideally, I would like that it doesn't take more than two months between the moment someone volunteers to complete a language and the official availability of a build including his work.
If we try to motivate volunteers and to understand where the obstacles are, we can probably make the "all languages" build virtually useless, since all relevant languages will have been covered. I've just started a discussion on ooo-l10n to check the status of the 19 extra translations for which someone volunteered so far. I hope that this will also help in finding if the current policy can be improved: after all, OpenOffice has (probably) more committers than any other Apache project, it accounts for 40% of all Apache web traffic (downloads excluded!) and if we identify clear problems with the policy we can definitely initiate changes to it.
Regards, Andrea.
