Re: build breakages and translators

[Ole Laursen <olau hardworking dk>]

Murray Cumming Comneon com writes:

[...]

> > This is a change in policy. It means that translators will 
> > have to be able to build far more modules than any other 
> > developer -- which is a large burden (given that some of them 
> > have very weird build systems). Was this really the intention 
> > of the release team's discussion at the last meeting?
> 
> It's my own suggestion. I was not aware that there was any policy that said
> that translators don't need to check their build file changes. Personally I
> can not imagine changing configure.in without then checking it by running
> configure. Is this because translators tend not to have the dependencies
> built? Hmm, I can't see a way around this.

This is part of it. But most translation teams are not exactly flooded
with man power. I have 70-80 modules checked out right now with
translations that I look after. If I had to think about configuring
and building all of those, I wouldn't have the time to keep them up to
date.

This is also why it is important that maintainers release bug fix
versions not too long after a x.0 release with updated translations. I
usually can't test my translations until there is package with the
program in Debian.


But I think some of these problems would go away if we switched to
gettext 0.11 so you wouldn't have to mess with configure.in to add a
.po file. That is lame. The program shouldn't stop building just
because someone messed up with a single .po file.

-- 
Ole Laursen
http://www.cs.auc.dk/~olau/