String Change Announcements

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

A few release cycles back, the documentation team began
asking for announcements of UI and string changes.  We
already had a string change announcement period in place
for the benefit of the translators, so the release team
just made it all coincide.  Easy, no problems.

Unfortunately, people tend to write very uninformative
string change announcements.  They look like this:

    Hi,

    I changed two string in BeanStalk.

    -- Jack

This is probably fine for translators.  They just open
their PO file for BeanStalk and look at any new or fuzzy
messages.  For the documentation team, however, this is
pretty much useless.

We can't diff our DocBook and PNG files against all the
strings in the source code.  We don't have any automatic
means of syncing up strings with the documentation (well,
except Dave Malcolm's write-docs-automatically DogTail
script).

For string change announcements to be useful to us, we
need to know exactly what strings have been added or
changed, and where those strings appear to the user.
If they're some sort of funny internal control string
(for instance, the string 'default:LTR' in GTK+), then
we'd like a short explanation of what the string does.
If you have good translator comments already, you can
probably just copy that.  And you are providing good
translator comments, right?

If maintainers could be more informative in their
string change announcements, it would help the
documentation team considerably.

// Shaun