Re: Proposal: GNOME Docs String Freeze

[Petr Kovar <pmkovar gnome org>]

On Wed, 31 May 2017 07:41:52 -0400
Jeremy Bicha <jbicha ubuntu com> wrote:

> On Wed, May 31, 2017 at 7:22 AM, Paul Cutler <pcutler gnome org> wrote:
> > FWIW, I agree with Andre that it's better to have correct documentation
> > shipped than incorrect with translations.  I know this last cycle, I was
> > fixing bugs right up until the release, which I know can be frustrating for
> > translators, but we had some old bugs I could fix.
>
> All of GNOME has bugs. With this proposal, you can still fix bugs at
> any time in master but some bugfixes are just too late to be shipped
> to stable distros immediately. I mean if a distro absolutely does not
> care about translations, they are welcome to cherry-pick commits from
> master or even ship git snapshots of master, but I doubt Ubuntu is the
> only distro that will benefit from more completely translated user
> help.

Thanks for reaching out, Jeremy. While I totally understand your concerns
about translators not having enough time to finish translating GNOME docs
(I'm a translator, too), there's the challenge of a small number of
contributors actively working on upstream docs at the moment. I've seen new
contributions coming from Ubuntu folks and I really hope that trend will
continue. ;)

As for the distros shipping docs packages, let's not forget about
help.gnome.org. I wouldn't be surprised if we got more visitors consuming
(some of the) content online than reading docs in yelp in their distro.

Assuming that we don't want to block bug fixes to docs because of
translations (which are, arguably, also wrong and need fixing), I'd propose
making more bug fix releases than just .1 and .2. Rolling a new tarball is
pretty cheap on the upstream side and we could, for example, release a
3.26.3 (or, 3.26.1.1, 3.26.2.1, etc.), which would follow some formal
process of string freeze period. This would only apply to docs packages, of
course.

I think that would be a good compromise. Thoughts?
 
Cheers,
pk