ACLs and translation

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

I just wanted to say I really agree with Miguel here pretty much 100%.


It would make a lot of sense to have ACLs for GNOME. We have 600+
people with access to the GNOME repository. That's a _lot_ of
people. In general, everybody has been amazingly well behaved, and we
don't have a lot of problems. I can't say that cleaning up after
people takes a large percentage of my time.

But, even highly experienced people make mistakes (I remember Mark
Galassi tagging the entire repository at one point), its easy to miss
the policy for a particular module, and even the simplest, most
obvious change may actually be not as simple and obvious as it seems
once presented to the maintainer.

I really can't imagine a programmer who got access to the GNOME
repository to work on Nautilus being offended if they have to ask me
to add them to a list before they can commit to orbit-perl.

So, the wish for ACLs isn't an attack on translators; I'm not
saying "the translators keep on messing things up". most of those
600 people with access to the repository _aren't_ translators, but
programmers on various modules.


Yes, translators would be affected more than other people. This
doesn't show that ACLs are evil, I think that it shows that there
are problems with the way we handle translation. It's just
ridiculous that someone translating GTK+ into Swahili needs
the same access rights as someone fixing bugs in gtkcontainer.c.

As Miguel said, ther are two activities here:

 - Internationalization. Marking strings, etc.
   This can be handled just like code changes, by sending patches
   to the maintainers, or by giving one or two people direct
   access to the module. (I'd have no problem adding Kjartan,
   or someone like that to the GTK+ ACL.)

 - Localization. Making the translations. This shouldn't 
   require direct CVS commit access. It just doesn't make 
   sense, and I don't think translators should have to
   learn about CVS, how to deal with branches, etc.


I think that without ACLs, our ability to scale the size of the
GNOME project will be limited, and we'll have to start telling
people _not_ to add modules to CVS, but instead to find another
home for them. Which is exactly the opposite result from what
the "ACLs restrict my freedom" crowd seems to want.

Regards,
                                        Owen

[ Now, actually implementing ACLs is another matter, so this
  may be a moot issue for the time being... ]