[no subject]

Lets take a look at the particular life a solo flying maintainer in
gnome, myself.

I worked alot on glade, and that is an understatement - I've brought it to its
first release - I saw it through the creation of the devtools suite
and advocated
the new suite, on top of working on glade, I tried my damndest to help get
gtkbuilder on the road for gtk+, since development roads in libglade were
pretty much closed.

This year was the dawn of 2008 and gtkbuilder was finally ready, and everyone's
stuck using a conversion script for glade files - when it comes to
free software,
any maintainer will tell you that people are far quicker to criticize
shortcommings
than to contribute patches - this is the brand of disgust /we/ have to
live with.

Now I'm not pulling stats out of svn, but some estimations that may startle are
that glade code base, on average in the last few years is probably made up of:
80% me
15% Juan Pablo Ugarte
5% Vincent Geddes, chpe and others
.... and Im not even kidding, I actually consider that a generous estimation.

This year we had an exceptional volunteer soc student that submitted many
anjuta related patches - some of which were even remotely relavent to the
gtkbuilder centric release I have no choice but to make (I'm over emphasizing
here, so you get my drift..).

Now, that was venting, but I think productive, I learned a few things
from hearing
you vent so I thought you should here my side, and now for something completely
different:

About translation teams in gnome, I dont know if were doing whats best, and
I'm sure there is room for improvement on this front, let me share my pov being
the CM of my own project, I have to manage branches and stuff when we
make development spikes or stable releases - what is LOOKS like to me,
is that we are WASTING the translations, I may be wrong, but this is how
it usually goes:

few weeks before freezes: were concentrating on bugfixes, and holding new
                                      stuff back a bit, planning the
next release

freeze comes: we generally branch here, as a small team we need to move fast
                     to get new features in --> at this point
translators are translating the
                     stable branch, and they are translating ALOT at this time.

release comes: more bug fixes, generally never any user visible changes in the
                       stable branch at this point.

Now, I asked the i18n team on more than one occasion, after release time, if I
was expected to merge all the good work the translators are doing on the
rotting old stale branch, into trunk (generally we backport some fixes to stable
but never the other way around) - I dont want to sound rude but I never got a
real answer, I got a "thanks for your consideration were working on
it" something
along those lines.

Now, when it comes to someone packing a distro or preparing a flashy new
"gnome release set", I can understand people liking that they can say its
"100% translated", but personally, and I think from one maintainer to another,
I could care less if its all translated on release date or not, we
obviously dont
have the resources for that final minute touch up so who are we trying to kid ?

I would be much happier having translators have a go, when they have time,
and translate new useful strings in trunk - by the time release date would
come around there would still be a freeze - and the remaining work to bring
translations up to 100% would be astoundingly less (seeing as most of
the work was done during the development cycle), I would guess that
naturally the rest of the translations would get cleared up in the next
minor release.

All that being said, I still write glade, at my own pace, and I'm
not deterred by some occasional frustrations, only sometimes I wish
we just had more hands on deck - hopefully something good can
come from this thread ;-)

Cheers,
                           -Tristan