Re: major libgweather Locations updates

["Djihed Afifi" <djihedlists googlemail com>]

What I fear is that this is just replacing a fundamentally flawed list
with another fundamentally flawed list (even if less so).

Are you sure you don't want to take the changes offline, make sure
that you make it as good as possible, take a year if needed, then
upload the almost perfect one?

On the one hand, I understand that getting it released and receiving
bug reports is important, on the other, it just seems to me that ~1800
strings is a bit too much a price in terms of manpower to have that.
That's at least 10 hours * 50 active teams = 500 hours. That's a lot.
With ~ 1 month left (effectively three weeks after the first one week
period) to fully translate it.

I wish you guys would consult translators first for such big changes.

Djihed

On Wed, Aug 6, 2008 at 4:57 PM, Dan Winship <danw gnome org> wrote:
> Djihed Afifi wrote:
>> First, are you absolutely sure this is stable now? I won't touch this
>> until it is.
>
> No, that's why I suggested people should wait a week or so before making
> major effort at translating it. Because as people report problems, I'm
> going to try to make improvements.
>
>> I am not sure what
>> methodology was used to prune or consider cities.
>
> For the most part, it is the same as before; we list cities where there
> are weather stations. The only difference is that now:
>
>    - We also try to include major cities that don't have their own
>      weather stations
>
>    - We try to have each location be a city name, rather than an
>      airport name or something else
>
>    - If there is a location in a small town, and there's a medium-sized
>      city nearby, we try to name the location after the medium-sized
>      city instead of the small town. (This depends on us having good
>      data about the relative sizes of cities, so it works better in
>      some countries than others.)
>
> Fundamentally, things are still driven by where there are weather
> stations reporting.
>
>> I had a quick look at Arab cities in general and Algerian cities in particular.
>
> So as a first pass, you sould just be comparing to GNOME 2.22, rather
> than to the theoretical perfect list of Algerian cities. You'll find
> that the list hasn't changed all that much (and hopefully where it has
> changed, it's better now. Eg, Algiers has been added,
> "Tamanrasset/Aguenna" (a combined city and airport name) has now become
> "Tamanrasset" (just the city name), etc.
>
>> Algeria also has a very odd population density. 80% of people live in
>> 15% of the land. But more than half the cities in the file are Saharan
>> cities.
>
> Yeah, so this is because that's where the weather stations are. From
> googling/wikipedia-ing, it looks like a lot of them are associated with
> oil fields. If they really are basically useless, we can remove them
> from the list. (Vincent and I were having this debate on IRC the other
> day, about a handful of weather stations in very very tiny towns (eg,
> ~100 people) in France. On the one hand, it seems better to keep
> them--maybe the computers at the oil field run GNOME? :) But on the
> other hand, more locations means more work for translators, so I can
> understand the desire to keep the list small...)
>
>> The city choice was not made on population either.
>
> For countries where we have population data, all cities with population
> greater than 100,000 are included. However, we don't have population
> data for very many countries. We can fix this manually by adding cities
> to libgweather/data/major-cities.txt.
>
>> In brief, some Algerian choosing cities, and looking under Algeria
>> will be wondering how exactly were the cities chosen. I suspect the
>> same will be true for many people around the world.
>
> Yes, but that was true in GNOME 2.22 too. This is a first step toward
> improving it.
>
> As for your question of what to do with suggested improvements, please
> don't make changes directly to Locations.xml.in at this time; put the
> fixes in a bug report instead.
>
> -- Dan
>