Re: On translation regressions due to freedesktop.org dependencies

[Rob Adams <readams readams net>]

My idea wasn't so much hosting translations in gnome cvs, but a short-
lived GNOME fork of shared-mime-info, which would be synchronized with
freedesktop.org upon each gnome release.  We would continue this only
for the Gnome 2.8 time frame.  After that, we would need a permanant
solution.

-Rob

On Tue, 2004-07-27 at 02:14 +0200, Christian Rose wrote:
> tis 2004-07-27 klockan 01.47 skrev Rob Adams:
> > I have a fairly simple solution -- import shared-mime-info into gnome
> > CVS and perform translations there, using all the same tools gnome
> > translators normally use.  It would then be fairly easy to sync
> > translations upstream periodically, including, at a minimum, at the time
> > of each gnome release.
> > 
> > This is a good short term solution, is it not?
> 
> I'm not really sure it is a solution.
> 
> This problem most likely isn't unique for GNOME translators -- it does
> affect KDE aswell. Saying the translations of the common MIME
> translations will be done in GNOME CVS is likely to be controversial.
> 
> But the biggest problem as I see it is the problem of synchronization.
> There's a reason we do no longer host translations of external
> (non-GNOME-cvs) projects in GNOME CVS anymore.
> We used to do so in the past, but the need for synchronization in both
> ways always made every such effort a chaos in the end. Partly because of
> the unclear responsibility of who was supposed to do the synchronization
> and when, but also because it was a mess for everyone eho tried to
> manually keep up with sorting out issues of changes only done upstream,
> changes only done downstream, and changes done simultaneously both up-
> and downstream. In the end all such effort ended up not being maintained
> at all because it was such a hairy mess. Believe me, a lot of people
> tried it, but all failed.
> 
> Also, there's also the aspect of easy access to source code -- while
> translators should in an ideal world not need access to source code, in
> reality there is a need, to catch i18n bugs but also to get the right
> context when context is missing. It's always a problem having to go
> somewhere else for source code, especially when what you're looking at
> is a six months old translation snapshot, and you need to figure out how
> it relates to six months never and recent source code.
> 
> So I'm not even convinced this is a good solution even short-time. We
> would still need to be able to easily synch back translations before
> GNOME 2.8, sort out the technical and administrative conflicts with TP
> translations and make sure that we don't step on anyone's toes for every
> existing translation, and then request to have a shared-mime-info
> release made in time for GNOME 2.8. Even if we should have volunteers to
> do that, it doesn't leave many week(s) for translation.
> 
> And there are many other modules that need very much translator
> attention in the time that's left for GNOME 2.8. Evolution is *BIG* in
> many ways...
> 
> 
> Christian
> 
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