Recent discussion about Persian team

["Roozbeh Pournader" <roozbeh gmail com>]

Hi.

I just found about this thread from Behdad and Hamed:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-i18n/2008-April/thread.html#00080

(Sorry, I have recently moved to California from Iran, and have not
been able to buy a laptop yet, and am really not able to use my new
employer's computers for GNOME work, which includes reading my
@farsiweb.info email. That will get solved shortly, when I get a
personal laptop. If anybody is interested in a quicker response from
me regarding Persian translations or any of my other GNOME work,
please either file a bug in the bugzilla or email me at my
roozbeh gmail com address for a while, until I get in shape.)

To cut the long story short, I and the other members of the
"volunteer" Persian translation team are interested to work with new
volunteers, if they want to work with us. Believe me, this is a quite
tiring work, translating hundreds of messages, finding i18n bugs,
pursuing them through numerous release cycles, etc. Who can't use more
hands? I don't think two teams for one language makes any sense.

There was also some accusations. My short answers:
* Sharif Linux is not completely free: That's true. Sharif Linux
includes a few things like Adobe Flash, so it's not completely free
software. But that is totally unrelated to its GNOME parts. The source
code CDs for Sharif Linux which are sent to anybody who has the
binaries for gratis contain all GNOME applications and their
translations in source form, under the original upstream license.
Ubuntu can take all those translations and use them, if they respect
the GPL/LGPL license.

* FarsiWeb hasn't upstreamed its translations: That's NOT true. Sharif
Linux 2 shipped GNOME 2.10. GNOME 2.12 and GNOME 2.14, the releases
after that, was the first GNOME releases that fully supported Persian
(more than 80% translated). FarsiWeb worked with the Persian team to
upstream all they could (they were not required to, they were only
required to provide the source code to people who had the binaries),
and that resulted in the first fully supported Persian localized
version of GNOME. BUT, there was not much Persian translation work by
volunteers after that, which is the reason Persian has again fallen
back to partially supported. I believe that if the Persian speaking
user community needs better Persian support in what they are using now
(vs the next release of Sharif Linux), they should learn localization
and Persian translation and then contribute.

* Sharif Linux has much better Persian support than Ubuntu: That's
absolutely true. FarsiWeb's technical team works very hard on Sharif
Linux, and has the help of people like Behdad Esfahbod (a former
FarsiWeb employee who has contributed huge amounts of time and great
code to GNOME and other free software projects). If Ubuntu wants to
catch on with the Persian support, the interested parties
(Persian-speaking volunteers?) need to put a few more thousands of
hours in it.

Before I forget, I would like to ask everyone NOT TO apply new Persian
translations or patches to the SVN without a review by another more
experienced translator, please! GNOME doesn't do that for code, and it
shouldn't do it for translations either.

Back to my day job,
Roozbeh