Re: Productivity suite (was Re: TARBALLS DUE: GNOME 2.11.3 DevelopmentRelease)

[msevior physics unimelb edu au]

>
> I for one would think it would be a sad day if we've given up the goal
> of having everything in the same CVS, so that cross-module efforts (such
> as translation, documentation, and so on) can have a decent chance to
> work on all the modules that are supposed to be in a release.
>
> Yes, I know that Fifth-Toe didn't have that requirement either (and with
> the expected results thereof in some cases). However, I think that if we
> want to make the process better by coordinating some aggregate releases
> with the core release, and market those aggregate releases as extra
> added value that are reasonably coherent and integrated with the rest of
> the desktop (which is the whole point of having the aggregate releases
> in the first place, I think) which is released at the same time, then we
> better also add some reasonable requirements for the modules in those
> aggregated releases.
>
> One such requirement should be using the same CVS repository as the rest
> of the desktop. Because if that is not the case, translations and
> translation efforts will always be inconsistent, since they in many
> cases will have to be produced by completely different teams. It doesn't
> matter how HIGgy, gnome-vfsy and gconfy and otherwise useful the
> application might be; if it's not consistently translated with the rest
> of the desktop (which almost always happens to be the case when there
> are seperate efforts involved), then it's an inconsistency that often
> will be immediately visible and unappealing to users of the translated
> versions. If there are inconsistencies in translations, some or all of
> the HIGifying effort might have been wasted anyway, in terms of effort
> of making a consistent experience...
>

Hi Everyone,
            Well there are several issues I guess.

Firstly the AbiWord project gains a LOT by having it's very own dedicated
server with CVS, webpage etc built into it. There is some admin overhead
associated with this but one of our team (uwog) genuinely enjoys the fun
(?) of doing the maintenence. (He loves looking at the various stats,
particularly the increase in interest we get from time to time :-)

We have our own paypal account which, while smallish, has been very useful
in getting developers to conferences (particularly GUADEC!) and for server
maintenence costs.

I can see why the GNOME project would want all it's modules in it's own
CVS. From the AbiWord perspective we would not like to give the ability to
add developers to the AbiWord commit list as we see fit. We would also
feel bad about removing developers from our commit list should we be asked
to remove people upon being hosted at gnome.

In addition we host several other libraries in CVS on our system that may
not be appropriate for gnome.

We also gain a lot from having our bugzilla. We can be quite fine-grained
about locating the modules associated with the bug and can change the
granularity as needed.

We would gain most from being associated with the fantastic
gnome-translation team.

We are currently thinking through the various ways we could make each
other's lives easier. For a start, uwog has made a script which makes all
the abiword *.po files available from the server once a day.

We will certainly consider any way proposed by GNOME to ease the integration.

Cheers

Martin