Re: Moduleset Reorganization -- Take two

[Petr Kovar <pmkovar gnome org>]

Hi!

I've couple of comments and things to consider with regard to the l10n side
of things...

"Jason D. Clinton" <me jasonclinton com>, Mon, 14 Mar 2011 15:28:08 -0500:

(...)

> Today, representatives from the Marketing Team (Andreas, Allan and
> myself) and Vincent, representing the Release Team, discussed this
> because it is time to select featured applications for 3.0's
> marketing. We agreed to move forward with this proposal. Beginning in
> the next few days the Marketing Team will select applications to
> feature for the 3.0 release. The criteria will be the following:
> 
> 1. Quality
> 2. Solving a popular problem
> 3. GNOME-iness
> 4. Bonus points for cross-platform-iness

I believe that GNOME translators would have nothing against marketing
team's promotion of, say, good GNOME software. It's actually a great idea.
At the same time, some of us would probably appreciate if the above criteria
could be further defined/elaborated.

For me, a quality GNOME application means that its development process is
predictable, scheduled to same degree, and providing translators and/or
documentation writers necessary time period of string freeze.

Furthermore, GNOME-iness to me means that an application developer is open
to the idea of collaborating with the GNOME Translation Project, whether
it's our community effort to have unified l10n workflow as far as GNOME
applications are concerned, possibility to foster translation consistency
among GNOME applications, or at least to have a communicative and responsive
application maintainer who doesn't regard translators to be second class
citizens in the application development processes.

So if you are prepared to give bonus points for cross-platform-iness
(nothing against that), why not consider giving bonus points for something
that has been one of the principal goals of the GNOME Project for quite
some time, that is i18n/l10n?

Yet there are other important GNOME aims like a11y, but perhaps that is
already included in that "Quality" part?

> Our goal is simply to promote the GNOME ecosystem in any manner that
> makes sense from a marketing perspective. Being a featured application
> is transient, canonically maintained as a list that happens to be live
> on our web sites at any given moment, and not particularly a badge of
> honor to be fought over or bandied about from a module's perspective.

That sounds reasonable, for sure.

> (It is not a statement that it is *the* GNOME app. of any particular
> function.) It merely reflects the Marketing Team's feelings about the
> application’s status on the above 4 criteria. And obviously, marketing
> being visually dominated, visual things are likely to get more
> attention.

Why not, but then again, it'd be bad if i18n/l10n or a11y, for that matter,
would get no or nearly zero attention...
 
> Marketing Team will look at (and build from source with jhbuild!)
> first applications which appear in the "apps" moduleset defined above
> but we may look outside the jhbuild modulesets. New projects or new
> application module maintainers are encouraged to continue to go
> through the process of having their application included in the
> jhbuild moduleset by the normal means (Bugzilla) to make it easier for
> us to screenshot. We are not making any judgments about political
> things like the locations of the project hosting. For example, we all

Well, form translators' point of view, this is not about politics, but about
manageable and efficient l10n workflow. At the end of the day, it's
always about the tools, you know...

> agree that Simple Scan, though hosted on LaunchPad, is going to be a
> featured application. Also, we all agree that both Banshee and
> Rhythmbox are excellent applications which will both be featured.
> There's no reason to select just one.

I wholeheartedly agree with the latter part.
 
> In the meeting today we did not address the concern of translator
> attention which was raised at the Summit but my personal feelings on
> the matter are that translators will continue, as they always have, to
> translate those modules which are popular regardless of whether they
> are featured or not.

Again, this is not and has not been about whether "translators will
continue to translate those modules which are popular", they will surely
do, but it is about the fundamental ways of workflow that GNOME translators
utilize when providing (quality) l10n support for GNOME applications.

Indeed, that has been covered thoroughly in this thread before.

> To make it absolutely clear, the list of featured applications is that
> list which is featured on the web at any particular moment. There’s no
> formal add or remove process except that normal process by which
> marketing is done. People interested in having their application
> featured are always welcome to mail the marketing-list to bring
> something new to our attention.
> 
> Marketing Team, now more than ever, could use volunteers and is always
> open to additional members. If you’re interested in joining the
> Marketing Team, hop on IRC and join #marketing and join the mailing
> list; we’d love the help.

Thanks, may I suggest that gnome-i18n members (or a person delegated by
them) could take part in the decission process then? That would possibly
make the situation clearer, more transparent to the GNOME translation
community, and, needless to say, for the benefit of the GNOME international
end-users.

CC'ing the gnome-i18n mailing list, since it's on-topic there as well.

Thanks again,
Petr Kovar