Re: New module proposal: Clutter core

[Petr Kovar <pmkovar gnome org>]

Hi!

Kenneth Nielsen <k nielsen81 gmail com>, Mon, 4 Oct 2010 15:45:02 +0200:

> 2010/10/4 Johannes Schmid <jhs jsschmid de>:
> > Hi!
> >
> >> Clutter is still hosted on a separate server because the Clutter
> >> Project wants to be an umbrella for a set of projects, like language
> >> bindings, toolkits, and applications that may or may not be related to
> >> the GNOME Project. we're fairly liberal with giving people access to
> >> the repository, and we have infrastructure in place for user
> >> repositories for contributors. the Bugzilla instance is still in place
> >> because Clutter is used in non-GNOME projects that might need
> >> restricted access.
> >
> > I want to raise the point again, that the separate git server is painful
> > for translators which is the main reason that I dislike it. (see
> > http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-i18n/2010-July/msg00075.html and
> > follow ups)
> >
> > Basically the point is that if we allow core modules to be hosted
> > elsewhere we can shut down the GNOME Translation Project as it exists
> > now completely because our whole quality work with coordinators and
> > reviewers will become obsolete. GNOME has a very long and good
> > tradition of high-level and consistent translations which would get
> > lost.
> >
> > The point is not that important for clutter which probably doesn't
> > contain many user visible strings but if we they yes here it will be
> > difficult to say no with other modules.
> >
> > Needless to say that I of course in general like the idea of having
> > clutter as a core module.
> >
> > Regards,
> > Johannes
> 
> I agree with Johannes, especially about the quality. As an easy fix
> for this, couldn't we just keep the translations in a git.gnome.org
> module? It would not allow us to run intltool-udpate and all that, but
> that would probably be ok as long and the maintainers would fetch new
> translations and update translation files with new strings regularly.

Oh, so here we go again. Thanks for raising this issue, guys. I'm, too,
convinced that it's important for the future of the GTP and GNOME
translation teams to decide what should we require from core GNOME modules
(or however we label/define it).

I'm not really sure whether it's realistic to expect any [code hosting]
infrastructure movement in this case, but as Aron Xu suggested the last time
this discussion came up, we could try to propose doing the clutter l10n
management the system-tools-backends way, i.e. maintaining a Git clone on
git.gnome.org.

Certainly, clutter is a fairly different piece of software, and this cloning
workflow may have some clear shortcomings. E.g. maintenance burden for
developers, depending on developers' time, no guarantee of up-to-date POT
files, as our translators are used to and expect it esp. when dealing with
tight deadlines, that is every six months.

If nothing more, we could at least persuade developers to stick to the more
closely managed module l10n community (if such a word is appropriate here),
so to not allow anyone on the net to submit translation work with, from the
GTP perspective, varying quality.

Best,
Petr Kovar