Re: On translation regressions due to freedesktop.org dependencies

[Christian Rose <menthos gnome org>]

tis 2004-07-27 klockan 01.47 skrev Rob Adams:
> I have a fairly simple solution -- import shared-mime-info into gnome
> CVS and perform translations there, using all the same tools gnome
> translators normally use.  It would then be fairly easy to sync
> translations upstream periodically, including, at a minimum, at the time
> of each gnome release.
> 
> This is a good short term solution, is it not?

I'm not really sure it is a solution.

This problem most likely isn't unique for GNOME translators -- it does
affect KDE aswell. Saying the translations of the common MIME
translations will be done in GNOME CVS is likely to be controversial.

But the biggest problem as I see it is the problem of synchronization.
There's a reason we do no longer host translations of external
(non-GNOME-cvs) projects in GNOME CVS anymore.
We used to do so in the past, but the need for synchronization in both
ways always made every such effort a chaos in the end. Partly because of
the unclear responsibility of who was supposed to do the synchronization
and when, but also because it was a mess for everyone eho tried to
manually keep up with sorting out issues of changes only done upstream,
changes only done downstream, and changes done simultaneously both up-
and downstream. In the end all such effort ended up not being maintained
at all because it was such a hairy mess. Believe me, a lot of people
tried it, but all failed.

Also, there's also the aspect of easy access to source code -- while
translators should in an ideal world not need access to source code, in
reality there is a need, to catch i18n bugs but also to get the right
context when context is missing. It's always a problem having to go
somewhere else for source code, especially when what you're looking at
is a six months old translation snapshot, and you need to figure out how
it relates to six months never and recent source code.

So I'm not even convinced this is a good solution even short-time. We
would still need to be able to easily synch back translations before
GNOME 2.8, sort out the technical and administrative conflicts with TP
translations and make sure that we don't step on anyone's toes for every
existing translation, and then request to have a shared-mime-info
release made in time for GNOME 2.8. Even if we should have volunteers to
do that, it doesn't leave many week(s) for translation.

And there are many other modules that need very much translator
attention in the time that's left for GNOME 2.8. Evolution is *BIG* in
many ways...


Christian