Re: Unannonced team de_BY or mistake?

[Christian Rose <menthos gnome org>]

tor 2003-12-18 klockan 15.47 skrev Gerfried Fuchs:
> > As already stated in this thread, we don't have any feature for ignoring
> > "fun" translations in the translation status.
> 
>  And I don't think that "ignoring" them would be a good thing. It would
> make it harder to update them.

True, but in my experience such "fun" translations are hardly ever
updated to begin with. They're typically made once because someone was
bored some night, but then left as they are since there is little
incentive to keep them constantly or even regularily up to par with the
application. That's my experience at least.

So I don't see those masses of "fun" translation teams that will cry
because they cannot regularily track the status for their "fun"
translations via the translation status pages, at least not those masses
that you appear to be seeing.


> > That means that we can't have de bavaria po, sv swedishchef po, or
> > en rickilakeshow po or anything else fun you can think of just yet,
> > because for every such fun variant an already long and hard to browse
> > list of languages/translation teams gets even longer and harder to
> > browse.
> 
>  I don't think that
> <http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gtp/status/gnome-2.6/> is too hard
> to browser, but that might be just me....

"This is false because it doesn't specifically apply to me" was always a
dumb argument, and it still is. Just as its opposite. "I can find any
document I want in these tall document piles on my desk, hence this
system with tall piles should be used by everyone" and all that, etc.

The mentioned page is three full page lengths on my screen, which is 3×
the maximum page length that is optimal for easy and information
finding, all else being equal. Scrolling is bad. Long scrolling even
worse. And scrolling because someone has added junk to an already long
list just stupid.


> One suggestion that would scale quite well (and would aready reduce the
> list significantly) is: Why isn't it already grouped by language?  So
> you only get the list of languages firstly displayed, and see the stats
> for every variant of the language in there?  There are three en
> variants, of course the two usual chinese variants, and some other sub
> variants, too. I don't think that there are many differences between
> some of those variants, but there was quite a big difference between
> bavaria slang po file and the de po file...

These variants are mostly unmaintained and have no corresponding team,
and is only present because someone at some time added such files to
some module. That doesn't imply that it's very useful to list those, and
we should thus also remove those (in fact, we already have removed some
nonsense po files such as es_ES.po for this reason).

pt, pt_BR, zh_TW, zh_CN are translation teams and actually entirely
different teams, so they're not "variants" in the sense you describe.
And they have maintained translations that are actually used by a large
number of people.

We can't keep all old, unmaintained and questionable junk forever. And
I'd much rather have ten new translation teams with actual translations
for official languages that can actually be of use to actual users, than
ten junk "fun" translations that are unmaintained and not really used by
anyone, just cluttering the status pages.


> > I agree that there must be allowed some fun. But only as long as it
> > doesn't get in the way of the serious stuff. In this case it does get in
> > the way. Either offer to change that fact, or accept it.
> 
>  I don't really believe your judging here. It looks rather like the
> "drip into the full barrel" (don't know a valid english phrase, though)
> and doesn't seem to really get into the way. 1 in 78 doesn't really let
> me grow grey hairs, do you really feel of it as such a pain?

Let me counter with "many a mickle makes a muckle" (the original saying
is "many small brooks makes a large river" in Swedish).

Come on, be realistic. For every single language on that page, someone
could argue "I want this fun variant I made of my language to also be
here". There's no reason we should treat de bavarian different than any
other translation that someone has made for fun or other questionable
purposes, or wants to create in the future.


Christian