Lucid and Maverick translations

[David Planella]

(Forwarding John's response to the list - thanks for the excellent
feedback!)

On dc, 2010-07-21 at 00:52 +1200, John Barstow wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 21, 2010 at 12:30 AM, David Planella
> <david.planella at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> >
> > Making them visible in Launchpad. That's when they are open so you can
> > start translating them in a given release, e.g.
> > https://translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu/maverick. I would suggest from
> > now on making this early in the cycle. Either at the start or at Alpha-1
> > or Alpha-2.
> >
> 
> Well, it's a tradeoff - the earlier we start translating the more
> likely it is that work is wasted (because strings keep changing).
> Whereas waiting too long means we don't have time to do the work.
> Looking at the schedule, I don't think I'd want to even bother
> translating until after DebianImportFreeze - too much churn in too
> many high-profile packages before that point. So that makes Alpha-2
> the best candidate.
> 
> > Setting the translation focus. That's the point when the
> > https://translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu URL is redirected to point to
> > a given release, so that translators can focus on it. Right now it
> > points to https://translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu/lucid and we'll need
> > to switch it to maverick soon. We can do this either on the
> > UserInterfaceFreeze milestone or at an earler one.
> >
> 
> UserInterfaceFreeze is probably the best choice here, as in theory it
> means we won't see a high volume of string changes. It would be good
> to see something like GNOME's string freeze, where all string changes
> get communicated to the translators via mailing list (ideally before
> they are actually committed so we can triage).

While I agree, we have to think that Ubuntu is a much bigger collection
of diverse packages from many different upstream projects. In GNOME
there is a much tighter policy on how i18n support is implemented,
inherited from the policies for official modules on using the GNOME
infrastructure, technologies and build system - not to forget the
awesome GNOME translation community as well. 

That said, we do have a string freeze policy as well [1], and barring
some exceptions, in the last cycles we've done a good job of adhering to
it and communicating freeze exceptions to translators.

Regards,
David.

[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FreezeExceptionProcess#UserInterfaceFreeze%
20Exceptions

-- 
David Planella
Ubuntu Translations Coordinator
www.ubuntu.com / www.davidplanella.wordpress.com
www.identi.ca/dplanella / www.twitter.com/dplanella
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