Re: Seeking gucharmap string freeze permission

[danilo gnome org (Danilo Åegan)]

Hi Behdad,

Today at 8:41, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:

> Because unfortunately gucharmap is in the unmaintained mode of
> operation.  Recently Roozbeh applied a patch to Pango to updated
> to 4.1, and I completed 4.1 support in Pango by updating the bidi
> tables.  It was just after that when Behnam noticed gucharmap and
> submitted a patch.  Noah has only been involved at the
> accepted/rejected level recently.

Understood.  But I can't "blame" translators for that (and any
additional work goes on them).  As I said, Christian Rose might have a  
different opinion, so you might have a better chance in poking him.

>> My suggestion would be to leave them untranslated at this time.  If it
>> wasn't important till now, I guess we can live with them being
>> untranslated for another release.  That way, you get Unicode 4.1
>> support, yet no string freeze breakage.
>
> I don't understand.  We've planned to update most of the tables
> anyway.  Do you mean we may apply the patch that involves strings
> or not?

No.  At least not unmodified.  If you remove the N_() markers around
those strings, I wouldn't have a problem with it, because it would not
involve string freeze breakages.

But this is far from a perfect situation. I.e. applications would end
up being half-translated, even if translators did their work up to
eg. 100%: it's a two edged sword in that enabling translation would 
hurt those with low resources (whose language might end up unsupported
because of this), and disabling translation would make it impossible
for anybody to have a completely translated UI (we have string freeze
for both of these reasons).  I'm not sure I am taking the best path
here, but I am not going to change my choice at this point in time
(and I feel like approving only 5 or less string changes now :).

Working on your side is also the fact that it's only 29 strings, but I
simply don't want to open up the door to other similar changes:
updates that could have been done months ago are not really good
candidates for string freeze time, IMO.


And until we get a better "supportedness" measure for languages in
Gnome (when the first reason for freeze would become void), I guess
we'll have to live with it, if you really think this update must go
in, even if untranslated.

>> (And I'm not sure if this doesn't break the feature freeze either, but
>> I'm not going to play a policeman here :)
>
> What kind of feature do you have in mind? ;)

"Unicode 4.1.0 support" ;-)

> Updating tables is dirty work that maintainers forget most of the
> time.  That's why I believe a central Unicode Characters Database
> library is in place.

Agreed.  But not relevant to the current problem involving Gnome 2.12
release which we expect in less than a month.


Cheers,
Danilo