Summary of the the discussions on documentation translation at UDS

[Matthew East]

Hi,

2009/11/30 David Planella <david.planella at ubuntu.com>:
> We talked to Jim Campbell and decided to move the xubuntu-docs
> translations out of the Ubuntu distro series and to a separate project
> in Launchpad.
>
> This is due to the fact that the xubuntu-docs package is no longer in
> main, which is a requirement for translations to be there (and for
> templates to be updated upon package upload).

Is there any possibility of an exception to this requirement in
Launchpad? Obviously the translations are still there, they are just
not being updated, which seems a bit silly.

> The advantages in having translations in a separate branch will be
> mainly for maintainers: they will no longer have to worry about updating
> templates (they'll be updated in Launchpad upon commit) or exporting
> translations (they will be automatically commited to a branch daily) -
> this functionality is not yet available in source packages.
>
> The only disadvantage will be that the translations will not have as
> much visibility as they had inside the Ubuntu distro series in Launchpad
> before.

This seems to me to be quite a prominent disadvantage. Equally, from
translators' point of view, I think that it's very confusing to have
translations in different places and to have to look outside the
Ubuntu distribution in order to translate Ubuntu native source
packages. It's the same with other native Ubuntu projects - there
doesn't seem to be any consistent rule about whether such projects
should be translated as upstream projects or source packages.

Having said that, it's the translators who should take a decision
about this. The only thing that concerns me from a documentation team
point of view is consistency: I'm not very happy about a different
approach being taken to xubuntu-docs as to ubuntu-docs, kubuntu-docs
and edubuntu-docs. I think that we should standardise on a particular
approach, and adopt it. When I last asked about whether it would be
appropriate to move ubuntu-docs translation to a Launchpad project to
take advantage of the automatic import/export features, from memory I
recall that the answer was "no" because of the confusion caused by
having translations in different places in Launchpad.

(Incidentally, it seems to me that if translation moves to the project
space rather than the package space, renaming the templates is no
longer necessary.)

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