Re: gedit string freeze breakage

[Christian Rose <menthos menthos com>]

On 14 Aug 2002, Tino Meinen wrote:
> > so I think it should stay in. But it is up to the translators, really-
> > whatever they say goes.
>
> That's a nice but rather void gesture. Translators do not really have a
> voice. We're not organised in this sense. Suppose I would be against a
> change. Would that be enough for the patch to be withdrawn? Or would it
> require a more famous person to be against? Or perhaps two or three
> translators agreeing with each other that this breakage should be
> reversed? Would that be enough?

Dunno. I think that currently whoever comes with an opinion has a voice.
So far there has been very little opinion. I don't think that should be
misinterpreted as if the opinions of only a selected few is being counted.

You also mention lack of organization of translators. I don't think that's
true at all. Rather the opoosite in fact -- we have teams, we have team
leaders, and then we have Kjartan who is the head of the GTP.


> I think we, translators, have to accept occasional string breakage and
> live with it.

Maybe, but occasional string breakage is a totally different thing from
lack of communication in a critical period of time, which is the real
problem and what this was about.

Also, freezes are freezes for a reason. Everyone's opinion of what
constitutes small changes is different, and in a critical period of time
it's better to require asking for permission than allowing everyone to
break things at random. Asking people to be modest about string changes
doesn't really work; everyone's opinion of what's important and
what's modest is different and if another developer could commit all his
outstanding string-breaking changes then why can't I? Then we have a
situation where string changes instead of decreasing shortly before the
release instead rapidly increased, as to the point where no translator
could keep the same pace, which was the common situation in the past.


> Though it is good to have developers being vigilant against haphazard
> changes during freeze-time.
>
> Perhaps, in the simple case of removing a space in a string, like the
> recent one in magicdev, the person who makes the change, should be
> required to check in the changes to the po files as well?

Oh, please no, I think there are many translators who are perfectly
capable of updating their files themselves, and prefer avoiding
unnecessary cvs conflicts (those are never fun to sort out).


Christian