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

[David Planella]

Hi all,

2009/1/18 Milo Casagrande <milo at casagrande.name>:
> Il giorno dom, 18/01/2009 alle 07.39 +0200, Adi Roiban ha scritto:
>> Below is the report based on Base pack: 2009-01-06 00:14:56 EET , but I
>> would add a cron job to update such a page once every 2 weeks.
>> http://l10n.ubuntu.tla.ro/rosetta-hardy-build/
>
> It's great, but there are a lot of false positive in there (at least as
> I see them and for my own language) like:
>
> Last-Translator
> Project-Id-Version
> Language-Team
>
> (There's also an error like "1 translated message".)
>

I believe that's this bug -> https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/rosetta/+bug/128324

Now regarding the issue at hand: first of all, I must say I share all
of Milan's concerns on his message [1], but as I believe most of his
points have now been understood, I will stop here.

Seeing that this also concerns translation packages updates, and that
Arne asked for suggestions, here's my simple suggestion: devise and
publish a schedule for language pack updates on each release cycle.

It does not have to be more than a wiki page with this information.
The way it is today is less than optimal and it does not use the
advantages of langpacks at all. We never know when or how the
langpacks will be released, and it usually boils down to an
announcement that they will be released in a couple of days, which
does not give us time to apply corrections or to set our translation
aims at all.

Having a plan for langpack updates would allow us to a) devise a
better way, or at least a schedule for testing them before release b)
think of a way to provide some sort of automatic testing in the way
Adi is suggesting and has already started implementing for the
ubuntu-docs.

As for the current issue, I have created a page to help better
tracking its status for all teams ->
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/TranslatingUbuntu/LangPackSecurityIssues.
Please feel free to add information about the status of this for your
teams.

Regards,
David.

[1] https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-translators/2009-January/002043.html