Re: Proposal: earlier tarball deadlines

[Ask Hjorth Larsen <asklarsen gmail com>]

Hi,

Am Fr., 16. Aug. 2019 um 20:49 Uhr schrieb <mcatanzaro gnome org>:
> On Fri, Aug 16, 2019 at 7:31 pm, Alexandre Franke <afranke gnome org>
> wrote:
> > Weekends are usually the time when most translations get done. If you
> > remove this opportunity, I guess we should consider freezing earlier
> > too so that translators basically get the same amount of time to do
> > their job.
>
> I'm a bit confused by this argument, because Monday is only the
> deadline, the last-possible day to release, not a recommended day. I'm
> going to do my 3.33.91 releases today most likely, or maybe tomorrow.
> Waiting until the deadline is very stressful IMO.
>
> Personally, my favorite time to release is right after the release
> reminder gets sent out (Thursday night in America). But of course any
> time before the tarball deadline is fine for release team.

The danger here is that translators sometimes assume that the tarball
deadline ("tarball day") is the translation deadline, since that is
the day where (apparently) the tarballs are rolled.  As I have since
learned, this is incorrect as each project releases at some random
time beforehand.  Which means translators don't have any useful
deadline.  Something could be done about that: It would require
defining an earliest possible tarball day which ensures that
translations make it on time.  But meanwhile, we (our team) probably
just try to have things done a few days before the deadline while
hoping for the best.  Translations committed late will then come along
in the subsequent release, so it's not the end of the world.

Having said that, according to my experience, the main problem is
actually whether distributions like Ubuntu pull the translations
properly.  They apparently pull many of their translations
independently of GNOME releases, and Launchpad has a billion bugs so
we sometimes go for several years with a project not updating its
translations and then have to file a bug report again *grumble*
*grumble*.

Best regards
Ask