Re: Proposed status page changes

[Christian Rose <menthos gnome org>]

mĺn 2003-11-24 klockan 19.58 skrev Christian Neumair:
> I'd like to get some more apps into the office section, since much
> software really belongs there.
> Software added/moved by me up to now:
> gnome-cups-manager
> libgnomecups

Why were these moved from extras? See below.


> Software I plan to add/move:
> - GNOME Office components (according to [1]) that are not in fifth-toe:
> gimp
> gimp-libgimp
> evolution
> sodipodi
> 
> - Other software:
> conglomerate (more usable and document-oriented than mlview)
> openoffice (containing some Ximian's OOo tweaks)
> printman

What should be in the "office" section should be what's officially part
of "GNOME Office". At least that has been the (perhaps not explicit
enough) policy up to now, and I am a strong believer in that we should
not change that policy.

The sections of the status pages are not there for the fun of
classification; they actually serve a purpose. They are primarily there
so that translators know that when they have translated the entire
"desktop" and "developer-libs" sections they have translated what is the
official GNOME Desktop and Developer Platform release, when they have
translated entire "fifth-toe" they have translated what makes the
official GNOME Fifth Toe release, and when they have translated entire
"office" they have translated the GNOME Office release, and so on. And
"extras" is for everything else.

Of course, "developer-app" doesn't fit in this scheme and doesn't match
any GNOME release that I know of, and I'm not sure why it was added when
we moved to the current version of the status pages to begin with.
Perhaps Carlos can answer that.

Also, as the http://www.gnome.org/gnome-office/ page is very old and
outdated and AFAIK there haven't been a coordinated GNOME Office release
for a very long time, I think we should skip having the seperate
"office" section altogether, as there isn't much point in having it
unless we can say we are sure this is actually GNOME Office, and that
there still is a point in seperating it from the rest with it actually
being a particular release. Also, many of these applications are
actually also currently a part of GNOME Fifth Toe (perhaps because of
the lack of GNOME Office releases), so there is a overlap that has been
a problem, as we couldn't and shouldn't list modules more than once. If
we remove the currently superfluous "office" section, we get rid of that
problem, as those applications can then be moved to fifth-toe or extras
where they actually belong.


> Maybe you have any other proposals?
> IMHO we definitly need to resolve and split up the extras (maybe even
> fifth-toe) section.
> Idea:
> - categorize apps better (image processing, multimedia, games,
> packaging, calculation, etc.)

I think that we in fact should have *fewer* sections, not more. The
reason is simple: More sections means more seperate pages that the
translators will have to monitor for changes. Thus, we should reduce the
number of sections to the most essential, so that the status pages are
still useful for monitoring purposes.

The translation status pages aren't freshmeat where we need detailed
classification based on functionality -- it's easy to look up what kind
of application an application is (that information is covered elsewhere,
for example on freshmeat), and that information usually won't change
over time. gedit won't suddenly become a file manager or a mail client,
etc.

If an application is part of the GNOME core release or Fifth Toe and so
on usually changes over time though, and that classification is more in
line with the task based approach that we should encourage translators
to use, and help them to use, and that I hope many already do use.
With task based approach I mean that many translators are (hopefully)
probably working more like "I want to translate the official GNOME
release and Fifth Toe, what do I need to do?" rather than "I feel for
translating some different GNOME-based text editors, what do I need to
do?". Thus, what release stuff is part of is the most primary
information, and further classification only secondary, if needed on the
status pages at all.

So what I propose is that we should have only these four sections on the
status pages:

* developer-libs - For stuff part of the official GNOME Developer
Platform release

* desktop - For stuff part of the official GNOME Desktop release

* fifth-toe - For stuff part of the official GNOME Fifth Toe release

* extras - For everything else

To be precise, I am of the opinion that the current "office" and
"developer-app" sections should be removed, and that their contents
should be moved to fifth-toe or extras, depending on where the
individual modules belong according to the definitions above.


Christian