On 12/10/2012 1:16 AM, Jürgen Schmidt wrote:
On 12/8/12 8:36 AM, janI wrote:
On 8 December 2012 00:34, Rob Weir <robw...@apache.org> wrote:
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.
If I may say so, the disconnect is already in place for the danish
translation....and I am sure none of us like it. The danish forum has one
simple solution, download LO. What is better that the people server get
swammed (which might lead to a change in policy) or users give up !
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).
+1, 2 of the 3 danish volunteers (not including me) have more or less
stopped working due to demotivation...we have not even been able to provide
them with a running version to test their work until very recently.
communication is key here and people can ask again and again if nothing
happened in time. We have so many things to do that it is often not easy
to make it right for everybody.
I would like to see everything more automated but even that needs time
and people who work on it.
Andrew and Herbert improved the build bots a lot (ok MacOS bot is still
missing) and you can easy find the result under
http://ci.apache.org/projects/openoffice/
The windows configuration is very close to our release configuration (no
binfilter) and should be perfect for testing of translations.
For the Danish translation for example I have updated Pootle and trunk
immediately after receiving the files. Everybody would have been able to
build it on trunk. Ok some strings are moved now and the translation
needs some tweaks as all other translations as well.
I am also sometimes demotivated because things didn't worked as expected
but I don't stop trying to make it better.
Juergen
It is very easy to add a language to the build. I think we are moving
in the direction of having a us+de build for the nightlies, with the
snapshot build covering the full set of languages. If there is a
language in the source tree that is not being built and should be,
please send a message to dev@ and we'll add it in. Additionally, we
should look at running the po2sdf step during the snapshot build, so
that only the check-in of a po file is required to get the changes in.
Andrew
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.
or at least just release of the language pack, which should be a lot easier
to vote on (if needed).
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.
This should be, check pootle server review status, and have one volunteer
send an e-mail, that the translation is ok.
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.
+1 to you procedure.
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.
If I can get help to get started, I would like to volunteer for that part.
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.
