Re: Tomboy is missing from the statistics pages

[Christian Rose <menthos gnome org>]

ons 2004-10-20 klockan 18.10 skrev Danilo Šegan:
> Today at 17:57, Laszlo Dvornik wrote:
> 
> > Tomboy is in the GNOME CVS, but it's missing from the statistics pages.
> 
> Ok, I've added it. We should also note that only modules which want
> translations handled through GTP should be in our status pages
> (i.e. this might be important in case of conflicts between several
> translators working on a same translation).  So, it would be best if
> module maintainers themselves asked for inclusion, so we know they're
> delegating translation handling to GTP.

In my personal opinion, module maintainers have already given such
delegation and silent agreement by having their software hosted in GNOME
CVS in the first place.

My reasoning is that it would be absurd for us to have different,
competing translation projects operating on GNOME CVS. A large part of
the benefit of having a translation project in the first place is that
the translation teams become numerous and quite often large, and that
they cooperate, gather a lot of experience and share a lot of knowledge
and are thus being able to provide extensive and high-quality coverage
for many languages. I really don't see much benefit in fragmentizing
translation projects and reducing those advantages, and thus I'd like to
see the whole GNOME CVS as the sole responsibility of the GNOME
Translation Project, since it's a natural responsibility boundary.

Potential maintainers that would not wish the GTP to translate their
application, but would instead prefer other translators, would still be
free to use their own CVS or services like Sourceforge and the like,
where they would be free to choose exactly whom should translate their
application into what language.

But in my experience, all maintainers that want to use GNOME CVS do so
because they explicitly *want* to benefit from other existing and
experienced hackers perhaps contributing to their application, and this
naturally includes translators and documentation writers. I've never
heard of a single maintainer that hoped for or expected otherwise. On
the contrary; the work of translators are almost always very much
appreciated by maintainers. I've rarely seen as much excitement as from
some maintainers when they've suddenly discovered they have now a
translation for their application into this and that language. Some
maintainers immediately make screenshots, preferrably if it's a language
with an exotic script, and make it big news.

I think the past silent general policy, if there has been one, has been
assuming this positiveness: "if there's a po directory in a module,
translators are free to provide functional (compiling) translations
without further asking". I see no reason for this to change, since in my
experience this has worked out extremely well. If there is some
maintainer that would want some additional restrictions, he or she can
inform about it in additional readme files or something like that.


Christian