Announcing the Rosetta alpha test

[Dafydd Harries]

You're receiving this email because you're one of a small group of
people who have expressed interest in Rosetta, a new web tool for
translating free/open source software.

Today we're beginning testing of the alpha release of Rosetta.

Our test server can be found at
https://rosetta.shuttleworthfoundation.org.

Most of the pages on the server can be accessed anonymously, but for
some things (changing preferences, translating), you will need to log
in. I'll shortly be generating accounts for all our testers.

About Rosetta
-------------

  Rosetta is being developed by a handful of people at Canonical Ltd.,
  the company behind the Ubuntu free software distribution.

  The goal of Rosetta is to get as much free/open source software
  translated into as many languages as possible. We want to make the
  translation process as easy as possible.

The Mailing List
----------------

  This email is going out to the newly-created rosetta-users mailing
  list. You can change your list settings at
  http://lists.ubuntulinux.org/mailman/listinfo/rosetta-users.

Caveat!
-------

  Rosetta is still pretty rough, so expect bugs. Of course, we want to
  hear about problems you encounter so we can fix them!

  You should be able to export any translations you make during the
  alpha test as PO files, but we recommend that you don't rely on being
  able to use translations that you make during the alpha test.

  Bugs should be sent to the mailing list. In due course, we will have a
  public bug tracking system.

Test Data
---------

  At present, we have imported data from GNOME Panel and GNOME Applets
  into the database. We would like to test the import with differenct
  projects during the alpha.

Known Issues
------------

  - Rosetta has performance problems, particularly with importing and
    exporting data, but also with the translation UI. We're working on
    optimising our database access in order to improve this.

  - Navigating Rosetta is not very smooth. Feedback on finding your way
    around the site would be very welcome.

  - Languages for specific countries (e.g. Spanish in Mexico, es_MX) are
    known to have problems.

  - Statistics for translation completeness are sometimes out of date.

Confidentiality
---------------

  We'd like to keep Rosetta under wraps for the time being, so please
  don't announce it to the world just yet!

Thanks for volunteering, and happy testing!

-- 
Dafydd