Ubuntu Docteam problems post string freeze

[Matthew Thomas]

On 8 Oct, 2005, at 1:09 PM, Claude Paroz wrote:
>
> Le samedi 08 octobre 2005 à 09:25 +0100, Matthew East a écrit :
>>
>> On Sat, 2005-10-08 at 02:49 -0300, Matthew Thomas wrote:
> ...
>>> I can think of four other options:
>>> 1.  Make the feature freeze earlier and/or harder.
>>> 2.  Make the documentation freeze later and/or softer.
>>> 3.  Increase the number of writers working in the time between those
>>>      two freezes.
>>> 4.  Reduce the scope of the documentation.
> ...
>> I have another one:
>>
>> 5. enforce the freezes.

That's what I meant by "Make the feature freeze ... harder". It applies 
only to the feature freeze and the user interface freeze; enforcing any 
of the other freezes more strictly (especially the documentation freeze 
itself!) wouldn't make the documentation more accurate.

>> In terms of (2), it might be a good idea to have the doc string freeze
>> later, and to allow _translations_ to come into the operating system
>> after release. This would be a good balance to strike in my opinion.

We do that already, right? I think we have language pack updates after 
the release 
<https://wiki.launchpad.canonical.com/RollingLanguagePacks>, though 
this doesn't seem to be mentioned on the Ubuntu site itself.

> ...
> I'm definitely in favour of (2), with a translator point of view.
> While I understand the importance of freeze concept for code, I don't
> see the point in freezing documentation at all, except maybe to keep
> updates as small as possible.
> ...

I can think of two other reasons for the freeze:
(1) in case something in the docs triggers a crasher or hang bug in Yelp
(2) to make the docs look less like embarrassing gibberish if you're
     using a language other than English and haven't downloaded any
     updates yet.

-- 
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/