Consolidating the various freezes

[Matthew East]

Hi,

> 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.

I'm not sure what is meant by a different level. If you mean that we
should establish a freeze which is later than the proposed UI freeze,
but that it shouldn't be on the ReleaseSchedule page, I don't really
agree: a freeze is a freeze.

I'd quite like to develop the idea that we could have a notification
period which begins before the UI freeze, in which significant changes
which might affect documentation are reported to the docteam. It
strikes me that translators could do with such notification too
(currently a lot of the translation work is forced into the short
period after string freeze, but that's not efficient, and it would be
helpful to have more translation work going on earlier).

On 14/09/2007, Soren Hansen <soren at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> IMO, there's very little harm in having translations of
> documentation out of sync with the exact wording the the "original"
> documentation.

No, that's not correct. Not only does it not work with translation
tools, but it would require a distinction between late changes to
language/grammer and late changes to substantive instructions, which
would be overcomplicated to maintain.

> 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).

We've considered this question quite carefully, don't worry. If you
want to start a fresh discussion about whether it's appropriate to
have a documentation freeze, please do it on the ubuntu-doc mailing
list. Otherwise, please take our word for it that it is required!

-- 
Matthew East
http://www.mdke.org
gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF