Hi Christophe, thanks for taking your time to answer the comments made. I have some questions and comments of my own; I hope you will find the time to answer them:
1) As I understand it, your policy was (and still is) that almost all contributions have to be reviewed and subsequently committed by you yourself (except for maybe a few exceptions). You have admitted yourself that this has in some cases taken several weeks or even longer (and now we're not talking about the time you were hospitalized). Please correct me if I'm wrong. Now, my question is: Why has everything to be reviewed and committed by you in person? I fully understand that you want to maintain a high quality, but surely there must be some other experienced translators in the team that you trust by now; people that have been translating for a long time and that you know have the same set of high standards as you? The French team is a rather big team with many contributors, compared to many other teams in the GTP, and still many smaller teams in the GTP have more than one reviewer and committer. This relationship is based on trust, and provides for automatic redundancy: When someone doesn't have time, some of the others will. Furthermore, as I understand it, all new contributions have to be sent for review to you in personal mail. Why not use a mailing list for this, and ask all contributions to be reviewed publically on the list? When you or one of your "approved" translators have reviewed it and changes have been made, then you or they can just commit it, and send a mail to the list to that effect. This would provided for an openess and transparancy that is important in the free software world, and extremely important for newcomers, since it provides answers automatically for many important questions, and avoids the "what happened to my work (or the work of others in a similar situation), did we send it to a black hole" type of questions. As I see it, the French team official policy and process for reviews and commits is an unecessarily closed and non-delegated one, and has an inherent flaw, which is that it collapses and stalls almost everyone's work the times when you do not have as much time to devote to such things as usual. Not having as much time as usual is completely natural, and happens to everyone of us. Noone is blaming you for that. What people are complaining about is that you seem to refuse to recognize the fact that everything is so dependant on you, and that you seem to not want to do anything about it (at least not in action). 2) To continue, there is the issue of duplicated web sites, irc channels etc. One of the fundamentals of free software work is that when people get the impression that something has very strong deficiencies and they aren't in the position to change it, they will start thinking about workarounds. (The non-ability to change things doesn't have to be the actual case, an impression of this is often enough). This doesn't have to be a bad thing, however. On the contrary, it is often a good thing; it allows people to continue work in an efficient way, and it highlights the problems that may have been existing, so that they can eventually get fixed. As I understand it, you are the only one with access to change the official website, or at least noone else knows how to do that. Then it seems quite logical that when you were away, and people started to get the impression that the official site wasn't as updated as it needed to be, and they got the impression that they weren't able to update it, that they started using another site which they could keep updated. This happens all the time and to everyone of us -- I know some docs that I have once written myself, and that I haven't had the time to keep updated. Now I discover that other people have duplicated those docs, in order to update them so that they reflect the current reality. Am I angry over that? No. Should I learn a lesson from it? Most probably yes, and the lesson to be learned is that either I should update my docs more frequently, or allow others to edit them more easily. That way I would avoid both the duplication and the confusion arising from conflicting instructions. Have you taken any steps to incorporate the kind of information from the unofficial website to the official one? Clearly, some thought that information to be necessary information. How will you make it more easy for trusted translators to update the information when you're away? 3) The third issue is the issue of attitude. As evidenced in this thread, there has been several conflicting sources of information: One official website and one "unofficial" one, one listing an official policy and process, and the other one listing other policies and process, and these instructions often being in conflict with eachother. Clearly, this would result (and has resulted) in a lot of confusion. I think that's entirely understandable. One can go about this in two ways: Either recognizing the fact that the confusion is understandable, and admit that and look into ways of improving the situation, or go like a bully and tell people that they are wrong, or even worse, stupid. But noone wants to be told that they're stupid, especially not after acting in good faith. RTFM isn't a good response, especially not if there are two FM. Seeing some of the responses in this thread, makes me convinced that there is room for a lot of improvement in the attitude area. Christian _______________________________________________ gnome-i18n mailing list gnome-i18n@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-i18n
