Re: Dead modules?

[Christian Rose <menthos gnome org>]

fre 2003-04-18 klockan 18.41 skrev Duarte Loreto:
> As I was finishing up the Portuguese translation of GNOME 2.2, I checked in 
> new files for some modules that had no activity on the main ChangeLog (the 
> one on the root directory) for some months other than new translation adding 
> in configure.in.
> 
> My question is, then, how sure are we that all modules listed on the Extra 
> page are still alive? Could it be that some teams are waisting time 
> translating modules that will not be released any further and so will not 
> put the new translations on the street?

It's important to understand that only modules listed on Desktop and
Developer-libs are the official GNOME 2.2 modules.

The rest, and in particular those modules listed on the Extras page, are
just modules that for the most part only happen to be in GNOME cvs for
one reason or the other. Some might become official parts of GNOME some
day, but there is no guarantee that such a thing will ever happen.
Neither is there a guarantee that development of those modules is
active. That may (and does) vary among those different modules, and at
different points in time.

If you suspect a module is dead and no longer developed, try to contact
its developers and ask them about it (read the README / AUTHORS /
MAINTAINERS files in the module's root directory for contact
information). If you can get confirmation that the module is in fact
dead and no longer needs translations, please report it to this mailing
list.

As an example, I was worried yesterday that rhythmbox development was
dead, so I contacted the author. It seems he and others will start
working on it again, so I think we should leave it on the status pages
for now.


> Another thing... Some modules have a gnome-2 branch. But the HEAD is listed 
> on the 1.4 Extras page. This makes me wonder...

The GNOME 1.4 pages and the list of modules and branches on them are in
general very much outdated. Don't pay too much attention to them. I
think Carlos is going to remove the 1.4 pages soon. There is hardly any
development going on targeted for 1.4 any longer anyway, and generating
those status pages takes a lot of resources from Carlos' machine.
Resources that he'll need for the upcoming 2.4 status pages. :-)


> Should we checkin the 
> gnome-2 translations as UTF-8 and the HEAD as ISO-8859-15 (put here your 
> code) or both as UTF-8? I've been checking in both as UTF-8, but I'm affraid 
> I'll break new 1.4 releases...

No. Just ignore the branch info on the 1.4 pages if you suspect it's not
updated. A good sign of that would be if the 1.4 info for a module says
that the branch for it is HEAD, and the 2.2 page says it's gnome-2-2 or
HEAD. Almost all modules' HEAD branches are GNOME 2.x software these
days, and should hence use UTF-8 for their translations. The exceptions
are very, very rare.


> One last on modules... From the 1.4 modules, which ones are still worth 
> translating/updating? I feel that I shouldn't waist time with 1.4 modules, 
> but it seems that at least Sodipodi, Evolution, Galeon and Gnumeric are 
> still making releases. Are there any others?

I'm not sure, but I don't think so.


Christian