Re: Reg. integration of patch for bug 109091

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Tue, Feb 17, 2004 at 12:50:14PM +0000, Dafydd Harries wrote:
> Ar 16/02/2004 am 10:48, ysgrifennodd Jody Goldberg:
> > The patch is a nice piece of 'fit and finish' work to ensure that a
> > corner case is handled smoothly.  I'd like to see this it go in and
> > would advocate that it go in even in an untranslated state if need
> > be.
> 
> To me, this does not make sense. Adding a string without marking it
> for translation is, in my opinion, worse than adding a string and making
> it translatable. User-visible strings which are not marked for
> translation are bugs. Therefore, adding a non-translatable string means
> introducing a bug.

In the general case I agree with you.  However, nothing is ever
quite so crystal clear.  In this instance it is a bug to not warn
the user that the data will be lost.  In star trek land our heads
would burst into flame about now :-)

We're left judging which bug is more severe, un-translated, or
un-warned.

> Perhaps developers need to be made more aware of why we have the string
> freeze, what constitutes a string freeze breakage, and what the
> procedure is for modifying strings during freeze. I know it's well
> documented, but that doesn't seem to be doing much good: just look at
> how slushy the current freeze is.
> 
> Developers need to have a mindset where they try and get the strings to
> a stable state earlier than the rest of the code.

I've definitely been more lax on this release than previous due to
the slushy nature of gtk right now.  With underlying libraries still
in flux the string freeze has come early.