Consolidating the various freezes

[Jordan Mantha]

On 9/14/07, Soren Hansen <soren at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 14, 2007 at 05:30:40PM +0200, Martin Pitt wrote:
> > Documentation might need its own (later) string freeze to allow
> > translators to catch up, but that's a different level IMHO.
>
> Agreed. IMO, there's very little harm in having translations of
> documentation out of sync with the exact wording the the "original"
> documentation.
>
> I'm surprised, actually, that documentation has had any sort of freeze
> process. Being a descriptive work rather than a defining one, I think it
> makes sense to allow the documentation to be changed up until only just
> a few days before release (to leave a tiny bit of time to fix up
> compilation issues or whatever).

Try to solidify/proofread/bug fix a whole distro's amount of
documentation *and* get it translated in a couple days. It's not that
easy ;-)

Translators don't like having to retranslate strings they've already
translated. If we don't freeze the docs and allow time for translation
to take place with minimal changes then people get quite upset,
reasonably so.

For the Documentation Team the doc freeze is quite important. We need
time to get everything proofread. It's really not much different than
software in this regard. We write as much content as possible until
the freeze and then go into "bug fixing" mode until release. The 2
issues we have are:
 1. having to describe an every-changing distro. It's helpful then to
have the doc freeze *after* the Feature Freeze and UI Freeze,
especially if screenshots are involved.
 2. giving enough time for translators to translate *before* the
release. generally 4-6 weeks is good, in past experience.

Matt East might have more to say but those are my thoughts on why we
have a doc string freeze.

-Jordan