Re: Help me get SVN access for translations

["Christian Rose" <menthos gnome org>]

On 10/21/07, Og Maciel <ogmaciel gnome org> wrote:
> Christian,
>
> A small comment on what you said in your email.  If the word of the
> administrator is the only valuable item you'd count towards granting
> someone svn access, than this process needs to be reviewed and dealt
> with as soon as possible, as it is prone to one single point of
> failure.

Most free software processes unfortunately are prone to single point
of failures, because they deal with volunteers. The contributors are
volunteers, the coordinatores are volunteers, the maintainers are
volunteers, and the accounts team are volunteers, and so on. We cannot
afford, or do not have the mandate to dictate, redundancy for
anything.

So I think the current process works quite well, given the
circumstances. It is not ideal, but I fail to see the alternatives.

Furthermore, the community is based on trust. To get responsibility,
you will have to have earned trust by people.

The accounts team are, as I said, volunteers, and the accounts team
deals with accounts for all of GNOME, and in some cases even things
aren't GNOME but just happens to live in the same repository as GNOME.
So they have quite a lot to do, and there's no way they can know all
about GNOME.

So, basically what the account team first does when they want to
resolve an account request is look up what module or translation team
the request is all about. Then they look up who is the relevant module
maintainer, or the translation team coordinator, for that. Then they
ask that person if they support the requestor's account request.
That's the only way the account team can work -- they ask whoever's in
charge for that part if they know and trust and support the requestor.
So if that's not the case, the account request will be denied straight
away.

The accounts team does not resolve team issues. There's no way they
could. Thus, if you feel there's something wrong with your team or
team coordinator, you should bring it up in the Translation Project,
but please do not bother the accounts team with it, because they're
already overworked, and there's nothing they can do about it as long
as there's a disagreement. So it is up to you as a contributor to
bring the issue up where it can be resolved -- if not in your language
team, then upstream in the GTP.

I've added two new FAQ points to
http://live.gnome.org/TranslationProject/AccountFAQ now -- hopefully
this will now be a little bit clearer.


Christian