Re: "Apparent" string-freeze breaks in gok, gnopernicus

[Christian Rose <menthos gnome org>]

sön 2004-09-12 klockan 20.55 skrev Carlos Perelló Marín:
> > As a side note of this discussion, it would probably be useful if we
> > could discuss intltool issues in terms of releases instead of something
> > vague and everchanging such as "CVS HEAD". I certainly hope that noone
> > never uses intltool CVS HEAD for anything but testing, and uses the
> > latest stable release for any serious translation work. I certainly hope
> > that the translation status pages uses nothing but the latest stable
> > intltool release, and *never* CVS HEAD of intltool. The translation
> > status pages should show what any translator should see if running
> > intltool themselves, using the latest stable release.
> 
> We were using the CVS HEAD version of intltool some months ago to fix a
> big bug in intltool until we got a new release. Should I stop doing it
> in the future? (as soon as a normal version is released I stop using the
> CVS version.

In my opinion yes. Otherwise we'll just have the "status pages shows one
thing, and (latest stable) intltool does another" confusion. The
translation status pages should simply show what the latest stable
intltool release does at all times to avoid any such confusion. We
already have enough confusion when the translation status pages suddenly
don't show what translators expect from their own runs of intltool.

As far as intltool or gettext goes, as long as a fix is not present in a
stable release, it's not fixed for translators. We never have required
translators to build anything (including tools) from CVS, and I don't
see why we should change that. Let's avoid by all means a situation
where we require all translators to use a version "CVS HEAD as of this
and that date, with patch number foo from this and that mailing list,
and without patch number bar from bugzilla" or something like that. It
should be possible for translators to simply good linguists, and not
necessarily intltool developers all of them.

The rest of the world appears to be able to actually release software
and give it version numbers that can be used for reference in
requirement lists and feature/bug discussions. I don't see why we
couldn't do the same.


Christian