Some details of what happened (was: Re: HEADS-UP! URGENT! Major problem with translations for Hardy and Intrepid.)

[Milan Bouchet-Valat]

Le dimanche 18 janvier 2009 à 03:12 +0800, Arne Goetje a écrit :
> [...]
Thanks for this precise feedback. I understand the problem now. Though,
even if I agree it's a serious problem that must be fixed ASAP and
avoided in the future, I'm still thinking you could have been a little
cooler and more concerned about explaining what's going on - which is
always a good method to get things done, in particular in free
software. ;-) The house is not burning, but there's room for security
improvements that we'll perform as soon as we can.

> Wouldn't have helped in this case. The buggy translations came from
> upstream. I agree that in some cases some locking would be useful. But
> on the other hand, if upstream translations have problems, they can be
> fixed faster for our users by using Launchpad (especially for stable
> releases, which don't receive upstream updates anymore except for
> regression and security fixes).
Manual fixing can be useful, but it should be restricted to those special case, and be locked as a general rule. This would make our work much simpler and avoid much duplicate work (inherent to forks).

In the current case, I guess that if we could automatically update
translations to Launchpad when they're fixed upstream, fixing would be
much straightforward for many packages (GNOME, KDE...). This cannot be
done when there are modifications in Ubuntu: we have to deal with
suggestions and so on... This was the sense of my remark.

> I'm sorry if my initial mails sounded rude, that was not my intention.
> However, I need to say that I wish to receive more feedback from you
> guys, especially when it comes to language-pack testing. Whenever we
> prepare new language-packs, they go to -proposed for stable releases and
> need to be tested before released to -updates. Since I'm doing this I
> haven't received any feedback if those proposed language-pack updates
> were actually OK. I ended up testing some languages I'm roughly familiar
> with myself (although I actually don't have the time for that, I'm
> usually busy with development and bug fixing). Therefor the "please
> report back" statement.
About language pack updates, I've never even thought about reporting because I've not experienced issues with them. They have always improved translations without regressions that I know of. Getting feedback is not always a good sign, you know ! :-)

> Since I am largely in charge of everything related to language support
> in ubuntu on the Canonical side, I would really appreciate it to receive
> feedback from you guys about problems or needed improvements in ubuntu
> in regard to language support (input handling, fonts, rendering and also
> translation related things). I don't have anything to do with Launchpad
> though, so complaints about Launchpad need to be directed to the
> Launchpad Translation Team via bug reports or questions. (They are
> notoriously under-staffed, though.)
As I said, Launchpad would've been the major improvement to bring to l10n teams. Dealing with French, other items are not a problem AFAIK.

One important feature is adding full language packs to a system that was first installed without network. Last time I checked that, you needed to go to System->Admin->Language Support, and check the right box manually once you're connected to the network, which is not intuitive. Thus unexperienced users can end up using OO.o and Firefox in English. It could be nice if Update Manager (or PackageKit soon) checked for language packs the first time network is connected. (You asked for requests, here's one!)

> Thanks for taking care of the translations, I know you do this
> voluntarily and in your free time (I also work on several projects in
> my
> limited free time) and I appreciate it.
Thanks for taking care of them too. I guess its not easy either, so let's make our common work more efficient.