A Policy for import requests

[Jordi Mallach]

Hello, Rosetta users!

I've been working with the Launchpad team for a few months already to
try to make your requests go through as fast as possible, and to answer
any questions you have, as far as my knowledge of the system goes.

During this time, most of my concerns have been related to requests to
import templates for products by individuals who are not involved in the
upstream development team, and just want to translate an application
into their language.

While at first we would do this happily, we soon saw this was a source of
problem for different reasons.

First, some people registered products without being the authors, had
all the files uploaded, translated to their language and then, for some
reason, never got back to update the templates periodically, etc. The
result was that certain products ended up being controlled by someone
who was unreachable, with old templates that weren't useful for anyone,
and basically created stale projects in the Launchpad archive. Many of
the translations never got back to the upstream repositories, and was
wasted work.

A second reason was when this happened, and even if the requester kept
doing a good job at updating the templates for everyone else, the
upstream authors learned about Rosetta having their files, and got
annoyed at us because they hadn't been notified, and they were ending up
with two different set of translations, some of them conflicting each
other.

We've thought about how to deal with these situations, and in some
cases, we're taking a conservative approach to try to be friendly to
upstream authors, and making our translator's work as useful as
possible.

A very short summary of what the policy says is that if you want
something to get imported into a product, the upstream authors need to
know and agree about it. If you want us to talk to them, we can do it.
If they don't accept, and the product is in Ubuntu, you'll still be able
to translate through Rosetta for ubuntu, and then feed the files
manually to the authors.

There are other exceptions, like handling of KDE and GNOME. Have a look
at the full policy in
https://wiki.launchpad.canonical.com/RosettaNewImportPolicy
and have it in mind when requesting new files.

Rosetta has worked very well during these months when upstream was
involved in the process, and we want to encourage that way of handling
things here.

There are a number of requests that haven't been dealt with while we
were discussing all of this. I will go over all of them and reply to
each one individually, offering help to contact the upstream authors. If
you're waiting for our reply, please be a bit patient as there is a some
backlog. If you suspect we lost your request, don't hesitate to remind
us!

For the Rosetta team,
Jordi
-- 
Jordi Mallach Pérez  --  Debian developer     http://www.debian.org/
jordi at sindominio.net     jordi at debian.org     http://www.sindominio.net/
GnuPG public key information available at http://oskuro.net/
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