Introducing docs freeze (was Re: Stripped translations for gnome-user-guide)

[danilo gnome org (Danilo Åegan)]

Hi Joachim,

Not sure if I should CC r-t on this as well (they are probably stumped
with work these days), but I hope d-d-l is ok.

Today at 14:24, Joachim Noreiko wrote:

> For the User Docs, I was hoping to keep the
> translators up to date about which parts of the XML
> were stable and which were not.

That's ok, Nickolay was talking about release notes, the description
of our forthcoming release for the masses to look at and enjoy ;)

  http://gnome.org/start/2.14/notes/

> I'm sorry that I didn't do this very much.
> I have discussed with Shaun and Danilo the idea of
> marking which parts of a manual are ready for
> translation and which are still being worked on in
> English.
> I'm interested to know what sort of length of time do
> you suggest for docs freeze, but I think that this
> rolling approach could be better. Or perhaps a
> combination of the two.

I think it would be *very* hard to stick a docs freeze in the 6-month
cycle.  I.e. we have following periods now:

 1. develop new features (4 months)
 2. feature freeze (fix bugs, UI review, 2 weeks before UI freeze)
 3. UI freeze (translate docs, 2 weeks before string freeze)
 4. string freeze (translate UI and docs, currently 4 weeks)

Now, it's clear 2 (from UI to string freeze) or 4 (feature to string
freeze) weeks is not enough for docs development and update, so we'd
be cutting into "develop new features" time as well.

We'd need you to tell us how much time you need for each next release
(we can only hope it would be shorter when updating, since you did a
lot of work in this round, but also note that it will be a bit more
boring, so harder to push people/yourself to do it as well ;), and
then we can see if we can integrate it.

Note that 4 weeks for updating both docs and UI translations is
probably not enough either, so we might want to push UI string freeze
earlier as well, and add a docs freeze on 4 weeks before release. 


Also note that simple rewording and spelling corrections can happen in
the docs freeze as well, using the "English translation" (perhaps we can
encourage this for UI and developers as well ;).


Others, opinions?

> This time around, *so* much of the User Guide needed
> to be worked on that a freeze wouldn't have been
> possible. (There's still a lot I didn't get round to
> doing.)

We've also made User Guide available to translators only a month or so
ago, so in this cycle, that's not important enough.

Cheers,
Danilo