Re: I18N spam part II -- "reviewed" po files

["R.I.P. Deaddog" <maddog linuxhall org>]

On Sun, 22 Jul 2001, Christian Rose wrote:

> * It's bureaucratic and doesn't fit well with the volunteer style of
> projects that most free software projects are, and I also think it puts
> pressure on the reviewer when in fact the translator should be
> responsible for his translation. What I mean is that there is not many
> people that would want to be held responsible for other people's
> translations, I think.
> I think we have an advantage in our informal system that way - anybody can
> comment, and anybody does. In many cases there is two or three people
> looking through the translation. I doubt that we would have that if people
> were required to do an offical, formal review.


Isn't this reviewer tag supposed to be optional, not a mandatory one? If
people don't want their name show up in reviewer field, just don't fill
it. Fatih, is it supposed to work that way?


> * The "mark-every-message-as-reviewed" system adds too much overhead to
> files. Po files can be insanely big as they are, we don't have add
> more clutter to every message. Also, the tools don't support it - I don't
> think the reviewd-by comments will survive many translation memory
> updates, merges, etc. Or am I wrong?


I can't agree more, since usually the whole translation is reviewed by one
person only, sometimes two and I guess three is very rare.


> * The "mark-whole-file-as-reviewed" system doen't work in a rapidly moving
> project like GNOME, I think. Some translations I update daily, and
> messages are thus added and changed daily, making the effective lifetime
> for a review to one day or so...


Again, is the "Last-translator" field having similar sense as
"Reviewer"? And I suppose other translations can't necessary mean to
update as often as they can. If it is said that reviewing can be out date
one or two days, then translations can also be outdate one or 2 days
later (for other langs).

So I guess something like "X-Last-Reviewer:" in addition to
"PO-Review-Date:" so that one can determine if the review is outdated, and
we needn't add all reviewers since pre-historic time.


> In short, I think this has to be solved by more informal reviews and
> getting the teams to really use their mailing lists, rather than inventing
> some formal review syntax, that is rather unlikely to be supported by
> gettext & co anytime soon.


It's true that informal reviewing is enough (that's my experience, not
necessary others), but inserting that reviewing information isn't bad.
Other applications can ignore that tag instead of segfault or refusing to
start, right? Don't think it's very harmful even if it's useless.

Abel