On Mon, 2005-09-19 at 13:54 +0530, Harish Krishnaswamy wrote: > 2. All commits to 'po' were being made both to the stable branch and the > HEAD. Any reason why this was not done in the case of Persian, Bengali > translations?
Well, the double-checking-in is usually considered a good practice, but is not necessarily easily done, specially in the last few days before a major release. In short, let's say that there is usually a lot of translations to review and/or check in before the deadline, and the Internet connection from a random part of the world may not be good enough. So, someone who is checking in translations usually assumes that he has six months to update different HEAD branches but only a few hours to updated the stable branches. He will try to maximize the number of stable branches, won't he? BTW, it was not only these two languages, but also a few others. > However, it would be helpful if you could make incremental updates > during the development cycle [2] or have all your huge changes > committed at least a day prior to the deadline. This would limit the > damage caused by errors in packaging or missing commits. People try that. We do incremental translation updates during the instability period, but it is sometimes a waste of time and resources to do that, simply because many messages may change or get removed practically the next day.after the check-in. That's the reason we have translation freezes, so we can work safely being assured that not many message changes will happen. That one-month is not usually enough either, and so we start earlier by asking developers to notify the gnome-i18n list about message changes a while before it starts. > 1. I do not know what languages I should watch out for - before carving > out a snapshot for pre-release testing. You need not watch for any language. Translators take care of the languages they care about if a maintainer announces his plan and sticks to it (a pre-announcement of the time a maintainer will check the tree out for final release would also be appreciated very much). They way it happened this time, translators assumed that the Evolution 2.4.0 release will be based on the gnome-2-12 tag, so they checked in their translations there, instead of HEAD (or both branches). > 2. The curtains are down not exactly when the tree is tagged but > precedes it by a build-test-fix-verify cycle that ranges from half a day > to one. So translators have no way of knowing for sure if their commits > on tarballs_due_date -1 would make into a release unless they put in > most of their work in advance or send me a personal alert. That's understandable. So they try their best to get in their work as early as possible. But they usually assume that a maintainer will not release a tarball earlier than the day tarballs are due, unless he announces so a while before. This time, I personally assumed that a translation checked in on September 4 or before that would definitely make it to the GNOME 2.12 releas. > Sure. I will release 2.4.0.1 (from *gnome-2-12* branch) with the > missing translations. Thanks a lot. We would really appreciate that. (We also need to go ping a few distributions, of course, which usually don't listen to us much if it's a third world language, but well, who knows.) Roozbeh _______________________________________________ gnome-i18n mailing list gnome-i18n@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-i18n
