Request for comments: Stop translating obsolete desktop docs

[Gabor Kelemen <kelemeng gnome hu>]

Hi Documentation team

During GUADEC we were faced a problem: there is a huge amount of text in 
GNOME to translate[1]. This can be discouraging for new contributors, 
and we came up with different ideas to solve this for UI and for docs.

A big part of the documentation is still in legacy DocBook format, which 
are hopefully going to be rewritten "soon", are mostly outdated and 
unmaintained, and in general not that helpful for users as the new 
Mallard style documents.

I have the feeling that it does not make sense anymore to expose these 
documentations for translation in damned-lies[2], because any effort to 
translate these would be wasted for the above reasons.
So my proposal is to remove DocBook documentation templates from the 3.8 
statistics page. This would not affect other packages than desktop[2], 
neither would existing translations - only future translations.

What does the Documentation Team think about this? The final word should 
be yours, so if you feel the integrity of GNOME Documentation or 
something else requires to translate whatever we have, we should be fine 
with that too.

This idea is not meant to judge your efforts as insufficient, but to 
offer translators only those templates which are likely to actually help 
our users. In other words, where it makes most sense to invest our time 
and more importantly: new translators time, who might not realize that 
they started translating some soon-to-be-rewritten material.

I'd also like to hear translators opinions too. What do those 
translators think who were not present at the GUADEC BoF? Back then, 
opinions were not unanimous about this proposal.


[1] 
https://live.gnome.org/TranslationProject/Events/GTPBoFGUADEC2012#Discuss_dropping_DocBook_for_core_modules_.28extras.3F.3F.29
[2] http://l10n.gnome.org/languages/hu/gnome-3-6/doc/

Regards
Gabor Kelemen