Phone translations keep coming in, still no word of a deadline

[David Planella]

Hi Ask,

Sorry for the delay in replying. Let me start with some context on dates.
First of all, the deadline continues being RTM at the end of August, so I
don't foresee any unexpected deadline. A few weeks ago, I contacted
translators to aim at completing the translations by the beginning of
August. The idea was to get the bulk of translations done so that the rest
of the time until end of the month could be used for testing features and
translations. Also, due to the plan of branching off to a derived distro in
Launchpad to track RTM (which happened last week), I wanted to make sure
that for each language the maximum number of translations got in before the
branching, as shipping the translations later could be more difficult.

What I had not foreseen was that the rate of changes, including
translatable strings, would still be high during the month, including new
projects that got internationalization support. I have tried to inform the
list whenever possible, but I should have taken this into account, and if
there hasn't been enough communication or the messaging was unclear, I
sincerely apologize.

The good news is that thanks to many of the core apps being shipped as
click packages, updating their translations and shipping them should be not
only possible, but relatively easy to do. For those which are shipped as
language packs, updating post-launch should also be possible, but the rate
of updates will in the end be determined by the manufacturer. While there
will be the change to update them post-RTM, I still recommend to have all
translations done by then. The rate of changes will slow down, but there
will not be a formal UI freeze for this release. I realize this will
require an additional effort by translators to keep up with the changes,
but I hope tools like the translations stats [1] can at least help tracking
the new strings being added.

It's the first time we're building a phone, which is untreaded territory
and it will require some adaptation and flexibility from everyone. Changes
are disruptive, not only for translators, but also for platform developers
who depend on features being landed and app developers to keep pace with
API changes. All that said, in the last two years, we have managed to pull
a completely new phone OS off the ground, which is no small feat. This has
been possible thanks to a very passionate group of individuals, including
platform and app developers, translators, advocates and many more, and I
can't wait to see the first devices hit the market!

Cheers,
David.

[1] http://projects.davidplanella.org/stats/utopic



On Tue, Aug 12, 2014 at 11:05 PM, Ask Hjorth Larsen <asklarsen at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Dear influential people whom I know to be reading this
>
> I shall have to apologize in advance for the bit of complaining that I
> shall be doing below.  The Ubuntu phone strings keep coming in at a
> steady pace, we have to hurry every day to patch everything up in case
> that day happens to be the deadline, which we don't know.
>
> Instead of working efficiently offline with po-files we have to work
> with Launchpad which is unstable and does not properly support a
> review process, because of all the small changes taking place across
> many modules.  The result is that we spend much more time patching up
> the translations every time there's a little update than it would take
> to do a big chunk of bulk translations once and for all, then run that
> once through the review process.  We have patched the Danish
> translation probably four times with big fanfare and e-mail exchanges,
> only to see ~200 new strings again today.  Please, please provide a
> proper string freeze and a deadline.  This is not all right.  Would
> you please try to talk to the responsible people and get them to
> provide some useful information or estimates that we can use to
> facilitate our own work?
>
> Best regards
> Ask
>
> --
> ubuntu-translators mailing list
> ubuntu-translators at lists.ubuntu.com
> https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-translators
>
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