[Ubuntu-manual] Releasing manuals less often, ditching translations

[Hannie Lafeber-Dumoleyn]

Let me react on this as a translator (Dutch). I totally agree with your 
proposal to release the manual once a year, or even only for the LTS 
versions. To us translators every 6 months is also a bit too much. The lucid 
version is a very good manual for people who are new to Ubuntu, even if they 
are using Maverick at the moment. We are about to release the lucid version 
in Dutch (waiting for the quickshot server to work again).
Regards,
Hannie Dumoleyn

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Benjamin Humphrey" <humphreybc at gmail.com>
To: "Manual mailing list" <ubuntu-manual at lists.launchpad.net>
Sent: Sunday, October 31, 2010 10:50 PM
Subject: [Ubuntu-manual] Releasing manuals less often, ditching translations


> Hey guys,
>
> I don't have much time to write a lengthy email so this is going to be
> to the point. As everyone will know, the last 4 months in this team
> have been terrible - we've been getting nothing done, the manual for
> Maverick is still not out and we're not moving forward. This is
> combination of a few things, myself and a lot of the core contributors
> have been extremely busy in the second half of 2010, we've been
> pushing hard for the Lucid manual and some of us might be a bit burnt
> out, our barrier for new contributors is way too high and the demand
> for a new manual every 6 months, plus translations and screenshots is
> just too much for the team to handle without full time contributors.
>
> Rather than see the team disintegrate, which would be terrible, I
> figure we need to slim our goals down a bit and perhaps give us a
> greater time span to work in. Hence I propose one (or both) of the
> following:
>
> * Not releasing the manual for every release, but perhaps only .04
> releases (yearly) or only LTS releases (every two years).
> * Releasing only in English, at least until we have a better
> infrastructure for translations
>
> My preference would be the first option. I feel that it's not
> necessary for us to have a new manual every 6 months, what with the
> large amount of documentation and support elsewhere and the fact that
> not enough changes every six months to justify a new book. I think
> that having our material in other languages is important, but it's
> difficult to coordinate such a mammoth task when we have very limited
> infrastructure for translation this amount of text.
>
> I believe if we toned down our lofty release goals, we'll have more
> time to work on things like the Support and Learning Center, the
> personas, quickstart booklets and other things, giving us a better,
> more complete and concise product overall, even if it was released
> less regularly.
>
> Please let me know your thoughts. We should also have a meeting soon.
>
> -- 
> Benjamin Humphrey
> interesting.co.nz
> ohso.co
>
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