Re: Improving things for translators

["Kenneth Nielsen" <k nielsen81 gmail com>]

On Thu, 2008-03-13 at 14:26 +0100, Vincent Untz wrote:
> Le jeudi 13 mars 2008, à 13:56 +0100, Kenneth Nielsen a écrit :
> > > One last item is that more and more teams are now able to translate the
> > > documentation, but it's very hard since it's not frozen and can change
> > > at the very last minute. Claude suggested on IRC that we add a new
> > > documentation freeze for translators: the freeze would start the
> > > week-end before the .0 release. This way the documentation can still be
> > > updated during the last week before the release and translators have a
> > > few days to update the translations. I think it'd make sense to lift the
> > > freeze after the .0 release (so documentation can still be updated
> > > between .0 and .1) and enforce it again the week-end before the .1
> > > release, and so on.
> > >
> > > Any comment about this proposal?
> > >
> > > Vincent
> > >
> > Sound great. Maybe a bit more than one week would be nice. If we make it
> > two weeks then we split the UI-string freeze period in two. Essentially
> > giving developers 2 weeks (to update documentation) and translators 2 week
> > to update them. Would that be acceptable to developers ?
> > Regards Kenneth Nielsen
>
> It won't work: the documentation is not written by developers, but by
> the documentation team. And they need more time to update all the
> documentation in GNOME. If we want to freeze the documentation, it can
> only be for a very short time at the end of the cycle.


Indeed.  Documentation writing doesn't really heat up
until after the feature freeze, which is roughly half
way through our release cycle.  That leaves the team
three months to update all the documentation.  Factor
in these facts:

Ok ok. I, in a temporary crain short, actually though that maybe, just maybe, there was some people employed somewhere to write documentation, just as I know that there are people employed to write some of the programs (and since my teacher in introductory programming insisted that writing documentation is a part of the developmentwork), I thought that maybe it was the same people, silly me! So I didn't know that the documentations team has that severe a shortage of resources. We do know about that at the translation teams. Almost all translator are working on this stuff in their sparetime and that means that you have to rememver to translate the time periods accordingly, one week or four days in't actually one week or four days. One week is four evenings and a weekend (provided off course that we have absolutely nothing else to do in our sparetime) and four days is nothing.

Anyway,  my question was actually a question  "Would that be acceptable" not a request "You'd better make it acceptable". Scarcity of resources and people working on this stuff in their sparetime is a reality of free software, so of you say it can't be done, I wont whine about it.

Regards Kenneth Nielsen