Re: Requirements for "Supported"

[Christian Rose <menthos menthos com>]

fre 2003-01-17 klockan 17.50 skrev Tino Meinen:
> So that raises the question for which audience this "supported" label is
> actually meant:
> 
> the translators: to spur them into translating all messages,
> or the user: to inform him that he can use the program in his native
> language.

The http://www.gnome.org/i18n/ page, on which the "supported" stuff is
used, is primarily for users (basically everything on www.gnome.org is
primarily for users; development/translation stuff is on
developer.gnome.org).

It's so users can know how much translated their GNOME environment will
be when they use it in their language, because not every language listed
on that page is fully supported, and directly or indirectly claiming so
wouldn't help any user (or GNOME). On the same time, we don't only want
to list the fully supported languages, since the user might want to know
that we're working on getting full support for his or her language, but
we're not there yet.


> Why *does* GNOME use the supported/partly supported/unsported labels?
> What use do they have?

Saying "50% < translation status < 90%" is difficult, so it's better to
set a label on it. We happen to call the level of supportedness for such
a language "partially supported". And we have to set the limits at some
values. When we're not in string freeze, the translation percentages
vary from day to day, and thus we need some form of thresholds.

Of course this terminology is not the absolute truth or even close to
it; it doesn't take into respect the quality of the translations or how
visible different pieces of code will be. But we need to calculate this
somehow, and, as already said, if you have more than 90% translated,
it's usually more than noticable anyway (I can't think of anyone
translating more than 90% and still missing the most visible messages).

That said, I think we'll wait with upping the requirement for
"Supported" from 80% to 90% until after the 2.2.0 release, since the
time frame is pretty limited.


Christian