Re: gok string freeze breakage

[Christian Rose <menthos gnome org>]

ons 2003-10-01 klockan 16.16 skrev Bill Haneman:
> I have always taken internationalization fixes to be quite different
> from other kinds of features; since 2.4.X is in part about localization
> improvements.  This is the background for the GOK changes: our commits
> to HEAD have so far been limited to bugfixes and
> internationalization-related refactors.  The internationalization issues
> are requiring the addition of new strings since the previous back-end
> implementation for some features was not internationalizable.

The GNOME 2.4 release *was* about localization improvements. I think
it's important to stress the past tense here. For all intents and
purposes, I think we should consider GNOME 2.4 as having been released,
and the current set of 2.4.x releases as only maintenance releases, only
adding the most trivial fixes and docs and translation updates; things
that usually doesn't add more bugs or can cause more trouble.
GNOME 2.5 is there for everything else that doesn't fit this
description.

So while I agree with you that i18n is important, I don't think your fix
to problem (2) is an entirely trivial fix. Thus I would like more time
to get more translations for this and have it tested that it works in
the unstable branch, instead of risking adding a bunch of new bugs and
issues to resolve to the stable, already released version. It's not like
2.6 is a decade away, we can probably live with this for five months or
so since this is not even a regression.
That's just my opinion, though.


> So, the general question is (though I accept that we may need to ask the
> specific questions on a case-by-case basis) whether internationalization
> fixes for GOK must wait for 2.6.  If not, then some string freeze
> breakage will be required.

As you point out, this will have to be decided on a case-by-case basis,
and I will give my opinions in the reply to your other mail.

But in general I don't think anything that amounts to anything more than
non-string-affecting bugs,  fixing typos or already existing messages
that haven't been gettextified should be fixed in GNOME 2.4 at this
point.


Christian