Re: Moduleset Reorganization -- Take two

[Kenneth Nielsen <k nielsen81 gmail com>]

First I should say that I think this all look very good. Considering
the proposed goals and the previous feedback, I think you have come up
with some elegant solutions. Cheers.

>  + we strongly encourage the application developers to follow the GNOME
>    development cycle. If a different development cycle is used, it has
>    to be documented to help contributors.

If you remember from the previous discussions, this is a sensitive
subject from a translations resource/translation completeness point of
view. The objections were that having a large group of applications (I
use the term widely), that has a well defined and common release
schedule, makes for a easily definable goals and makes it easy to
maximize translation performance with limited resources.

This objection still stands, "strongly encouraging", does not give me
a guarantee against untimely string changes and the concomitant loss
of work, the way that the current workflow for the desktop module set
to a very large degree does.

However, if I try to look at this from a broader perspective, I do see
some convincing "greater good" arguments for this decision. So
although the objection is still valid, I think the proposed solution
is a worthwhile compromise. (Lets just hope that "strongly encourage"
means way more than 75% of the projects will follow, and not, like I
may fear, less than 25% :))

I would like to elaborate on one very important thing that you
mention, and that is that if a project chooses not to follow the GNOME
release schedule, the key is information. So when/(if) this happens it
has to be extremely visibly, preferably right there in l10n.org. So I
would suggest as a technical detail to your proposal, that it is a
_requirement_ for project maintainers of projects that don't follow
the GNOME release schedule, to not only document it in their
development fora, but also to publish a (tentative) string freeze and
release date somewhere in the repository, so that it can be
automatically parsed and published on damned lies.

With regards to external translation tools I will reply in the new
thread Andre has started.

Regards Kenneth