On Fri, Dec 7, 2012 at 5:40 PM, Andrea Pescetti <pesce...@apache.org> wrote: > 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). >
So why haven't we released the Polish translation? I agree that is a problem, but not one that requires policy to change to solve. Maybe releases under incubation were a pain the ass. But the are relatively easy now. We should try it sometime... > 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. > Ergo, release more often. This does not require any policy changes. It just requires that we release more often. > 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. > We just need to do some very simple things: 1) When a translation is ready we need to test it. 2) When it is tested, we need to create 1) a source bundle containing the changed source files, and a 2) a set of binary packages containing the new installs. 3) We have a 72 hour vote on the incremental source package 4) If the vote passes then we put the new binaries on SourceForge, put the new source bundle on the Apache mirrors, update the website and send out an announcement. This is not hard. Maybe some one-time upfront work to create incremental language source bundles on demand. It is certainly simpler than trying to get a policy change. Maybe it would help if someone volunteered to be Release Manager for language releases between our numbered functional releases? Then one person can focus on the major builds, while another person focuses on getting out these incremental translations. I think we can go a lot faster on new languages, but IMHO there is no policy holding us back. It is just work. -Rob > Regards, > Andrea.
