Re: Bug process thoughts

[Christian Rose <menthos menthos com>]

Michael Twomey wrote:
>         I wanted to ask what are people's views on the l10n/i18n bug fixing
> process in Gnome? My current understanding is that people have to
> contact the relevant language team about linguistic or technical (e.g.
> screwed up messages) problems.

That's probably true for many (or most) language teams, yes. If
something is very broken (e.g. preventing a successful build of the
module, or a pure technical error in the translation file), sometimes
also module maintainers fix it, to save some time.


> There doesn't seem to be any field in
> bugzilla.gnome.org which allows people to file bugs about l10n problems.

As I understand, there were plans on adding a "translation" or "i18n"
bug reporting section to the individual bugzilla.gnome.org components,
but I don't know how that endend. You could try asking about the
bugzilla stuff on gnome-hackers, that seems to be the place where
bugzilla topics is discussed and planned.


> The reason I'm asking this is that I would like to define a simple
> process which allows people to quickly and easily log bugs (for example
> Sun's test engineers or linguists) about localisation problems

Yes, I think that's a great idea. Some people don't like asking on a
completely unknown mailing list, and having a bug forum is also a way
better form of tracking the issue.


> and then allow people who aren't directly part of the language teams (such as Sun
> engineers like me) to come in and fix a problem.

Hmm, I still think people in the language teams are the best to fix pure
linguistic problems... I think the i18n bugs should be assigned to
whoever did the translation for that module. I have no problem with Sun
dudes for example being put as QA responsible for the individual bugs
(there is such a field in Bugzilla).
But, as I said, I think the bugs should primarily be fixed by whoever
introduced them in the first place, otherwise you never learn ;-)
That's really not very different from the situation for coders, the
person assigned to fix bugs are those who are responsible for that code.

I think Bugzilla is very limited though when it comes to multiple
"default owners" to a single module/component (only one is allowed), so
maybe it has to be a Sun dude assigned after all (but I still think the
responsible translator should be contacted and allowed to fix his
error).


> I know this might sound a bit odd trying to formalize the translation
> process

Formalizing is good. :-)


> but I think it will make it much simpler and less intimidating
> for people to come in and find/fix problems in the future.

Hmm, I always find it intimidating when other people fix problems with
my stuff... That's why I want to be informed so I can fix it myself :)


Christian