Reminders: 1. UI freeze == string freeze, notifications needed for translators. 2. please remember i18n.

[Timo Jyrinki]

2008/3/7, Scott James Remnant <scott at canonical.com>:
> Package maintainers are no more in the light than the translators, all
>  the package maintainer is doing is packaging a new upstream version and
>  uploading it.

The wider subject is an interesting one any maybe something that
should be part of some tool - telling "stringinterdiff" between
releases.

Anyway, I'm most interested in the ubuntu-specific packages, where the
maintainers are also the developers - they should note whenever they
change any text in the program during UIFreeze. Also the program UI
should of course be ready by that time. If eg. GNOME application has
strings changed during their own string freeze, package maintainer
cannot be excepted to always notice that. But when a new upstream
version of some user-visible main-repository program is put in, like
network-manager-applet, I think it should be part of the process
during UI freeze to notify translators since it's almost certain have
changed.

I'm not sure about the best way developers could spot the changes if
one is not sure. One is that once the template from the source package
is updated in Launchpad's Rosetta, it's seen in the most common
packages easily if all languages now miss some translations. But
that's more a tip from the translator's perspective...

Part of the subject is also, as noted, that if application
functionality is changed so that documentation needs updating, the doc
team needs to be contacted. These collaborations with documentation
and translator teams during UI Freeze should be part of the very basic
developer documentation (if it's not there yet).

> Both of the packages referred to, I believe, are part of a standard
>  freeze exception -- as is the entire GNOME desktop.

Maybe FeatureFreeze exception, but not UserInterfaceFreeze exception?
The UIFreeze process might very well need changing, and spreading
information about it, but it's currently as it is described on the
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FreezeExceptionProcess page.

-Timo