Release Team meeting minutes: 2003-07-09

[Murray Cumming Comneon com]

Minutes for GNOME release team meeting 2003-07-09
===================================================

Present:                        Apologies:

Murray Cumming (Minutes)	Jeff Waugh (Chairing)
Frederic Crozat               Andrew Sobala			
Luis Villa				Jonathan Blandford
Mark McLoughlin
Kjartan Maraas (joined near end)                           


Actions:

  DONE: Luis to Send feature-freeze email.

  DONE: Luis to read and reply to Iain's GNOME Nirvana email.

  DONE: Jeff to do 2.3.3 release.
        -> Done after delays due to ORBit "breakage".

  DONE: Jeff to announce 2.4 new modules list.

  PENDING: Jonathan to work on final control-center bits for DrWright.

  NEW: Luis to make sure that the accessibility and gnopernicus people know
about the excessive translatable strings problem.
  
  NEW: Luis or Andrew to give us a bug status after the next bug day, which
Luis hopes to be part of.
 
  NEW: Murray to request weekly i18n status email.
 
  NEW: Murray to request examples/information about dodgy schema file
strings. And maybe encourage a schema review.
 
  NEW: Murray to tell Fred and the release-team how to change our
www.gnome.org stuff. 


Decisions and discussion:

  * New release-team member

  Andrew Sobala of bug-squad fame is joining us, replacing Glynn Foster.
However, in Jeff's absence we are not sure if he's on our 
  mailing list yet. Hopefully he can join us next week.

  * Iain's GNOME Nirvana email.
  
  Luis has replied to it. Discussion ongoing. There is a general feeling
that it would be nice to improve the Software Map/5th Toe situation, but
that this is not exactly the solution.

  * ui-review.

  There has been _no_ official ui-reviews of any modules so far. Murray
thinks this is partly because nobody has the time to lead the way. However,
  - Murray has reviewed lots of current usability/HIG bugs so we have some
idea of
what is happening:
    http://www.gnome.org/start/2.3/ui-review/index.html
  - The HIG is part of our culture now so people are fixing stuff all the
time, not just during ui-review.
  - Epiphany has been thoroughly ui-reviewed along the way. It's part of its
reason for being.

  Some of the new modules, such as gnopernicus and gnomemeeting probably do
need to have their first ever ui-review. We really hope that someone takes a
look at them.

  * gnopernicus strings

  Luis and some i18n people discovered an unusually high (1000?) number of
translatable strings in gnopernicus. This is almost 
  certainly a mistake. It needs to be dealt with as soon as possible so that
the translators can do their work. It can probebly be
  solved easily. Action: Luis to make sure that the accessibility and
gnopernicus people see the thread.

  We would like to avoid problems like this in the future, though we don't
know how this could have been discovered sooner. The very later 2.4 new
modules announcement was probably part of the problem.

  * internationalization status

  It would be nice to have a weekly report on the i18n status. For instance,
any particular problems, percentages for various modules/languages. In the
past Kjartan did this informally, but Murray will ask the i18n team if they
can send us a regular status email - they already have some great online
stats.

  Kjartan says that there are some problematic schema files. Some of the
english strings are either difficult to translate or poorly written even in
english. Murray will ask the i18n people for some examples so that we can
raise the issue more widely. Not all translators are confident enough to
criticise the original english strings. Apparently the schema issue is
getting some bugzilla attention already.

  * Accessibility.

  Apparently Brian Cameron is working on a new "How to accessibilityize an
application" document. That would be cool.

  * Update web pages

  We need to
  - Put a link to start/2.3 on the main page.
  - Update the version numbers on the schedule, without changing dates,
because we missed one release due to ORBit breakage.
  - Mention that 2.6 will happen in the 6 months after 2.4.
  Fred will make the changes. Murray will tell him how.

  * Bugs Status

  Nothing particular at the moment, but Luis plans to have more information
next week after reviewing the bugs and being more involved in the next bug
day. 

Murray Cumming
murrayc usa net
www.murrayc.com