Re: Import from Launchpad

[danilo gnome org (Danilo Šegan)]

Hi Olav,

Today at 10:03, Olav Vitters wrote:

> On Tue, Feb 05, 2008 at 08:54:52AM +0100, Danilo Šegan wrote:
>> Yesterday at 20:22, Djihed Afifi wrote:
>> 
>> > +1 from me for Khaled Hosny to get launchpad team coordinatorship. He
>> > sent an email earlier.
>> 
>> I've emailed current coordinator so I am waiting for response.
>> 
>> >> Solving social problems is really up to social elements: people.
>> >
>> > I hope that you don't mean that this is a social problem.
>> 
>> "Social" as in involving people and communication, versus "technical"
>> problem (since it's completely possible to restrict access to any of
>> the languages in Ubuntu to whoever you wish).  There is no way we
>> could have fixed the problem without people approaching us and telling
>> us something is wrong.
>
> There have been *loads* of complaints on planet gnome about this. I know
> various questions have been asked directly as well. However, just
> because someone needs to communicate the problem doesn't make it social.

Ok, I'll keep this simple.  Launchpad already provides locking of
entire language translation for eg. Ubuntu.  So, there are no
technical obstacles to doing that.

It's Ubuntu's social arrangements you need to get involved into if you
want Ubuntu's community to decide to lock translations for all
languages.  All my answers have been strictly from Launchpad's
perspective, understanding that it'd be hard to convince Ubuntu
community to lock all their translations.

Maybe I've should not have used the word 'social'.  I tried to
contrast it with 'technical' above, hoping that would clarify it.

Btw, Planet GNOME is not an efficient communication/collaboration
mechanism.

> If some language doesn't want Ubuntu to change their strings (especially
> as they have real evidence that the quality decreases), then this advice
> should be followed.

Now, we've seen requests coming from GNOME and KDE asking for this.
They are not representatives of a language, but (usually) largest
translator communities for a language.  However, entire Ubuntu
contains much more than GNOME and KDE (GNOME and KDE being roughly 30%
of all necessary translation work).  At the moment, we don't
provide categorization such as GNOME/KDE translations in Launchpad, so
we can't lock their translations specifically.  We do plan to provide
it, but it involves work.

So, it's possible to lock entire language, but there are no
representatives of "entire language".  If all major translators for a
language come to an agreement, they can ask Ubuntu translation team
for that language to lock the translations.  Whether they'll do that
or not is not up to technology (i.e. Launchpad) to decide.

> If I read
> https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/rosetta/+bug/188907/comments/8, then it
> is a problem within Ubuntu that the quality is subpar. Currently the
> efforts are focussed on improving that quality instead of following the
> wish of the GNOME translator teams.

It is.  I am not directly involved in Ubuntu translation, I am only
a Launchpad developer.  Ubuntu has a huge community and they have
a community decision process which I am not too familiar with.

What I can talk about is how we plan to approach the practical
problems Ubuntu's mass popularity caused (possibly together with early
Launchpad), and come up with practical solutions.  A practical
solution is not removing Launchpad from the picture, because as a
tool, it provides what it is designed to provide.

> e.g. with remarks such as
> | 'However, that might also remove bug fixes'
>
> I further don't understand the response to 
> | - Upstream teams get bug reports about strings that are correct
> | upstream but have been changed in launchpad
>
> You are suggesting to push launchpad bugs to GNOME Bugzilla and that
> GNOME teams should check things in Ubuntu. While the issue is that GNOME
> Bugzilla gets complaints because Ubuntu changed the translation.
> Meaning: quality decreased and GNOME people get bugged about things they
> aren't responsible for.

As Johannes correctly read my response (in the bug report), I
misunderstood the note.  I thought it was about "you" wanting to get
bug reports automatically when someone notices a problem in GNOME
translation using Launchpad.

So, I never suggested what you've seemed to have understood.

However, Ubuntu, afaik, strongly encourages people to submit bugs to
Launchpad, and bug triagers forward them upstream only if they are
really upstream.  Still, Ubuntu has a huge bunch of users who read no
documentation, so GNOME ends up with spurious bug reports.  I note
again that I am not directly involved in Ubuntu, so I can't tell you
how to fix this problem.

This reminds me of the times bug-buddy got xml-rpc submission support,
when it was included in Ubuntu, leading to hundreds of incomplete bug
reports.

> | Since we can't accept the simple solution of disallowing Ubuntu
> | translations through Launchpad
>
> This pushes the problem towards GNOME translator teams. Now they
> have to coordinate with one distribution. I have seen some of the
> translations that occurred for the Dutch language. The quality was
> *really* bad. Meaning: the translation contained stuff like 'Paste' was
> translated into 'Insert' (forgot the exact translation, but it didn't
> make any sense), etc. Theoretically Ubuntu might want to change the
> translation somehow... but I wonder if that really occurs in practice.
> Especially with some of the really bad translations that have I've seen.

I am pretty sure you know quite a few Dutch Ubuntu users.  If they
have problems with that, they should talk to Ubuntu Dutch translation
team and see how they can resolve that (locking translations is also
an option, if Ubuntu Dutch translators agree).

Now, I know it's hard for you to buy into technical difficulties
I've been describing, but at the moment, we simply can't lock only
GNOME translations.  And if everything is locked, a huge amount of
other translations which don't have similarly active communities like
KDE and GNOME will be left out in the cold.

I understand that my response was long and that you failed to notice
that I said we'll deal with the problem technically as well.  However,
it's a complicated one, and it will take time.

If you insist that that's not good enough, then you can go ask the
relevant translation team for your language to not let anyone in the
team and to make the team 'restricted'.

>> I am pretty sure you are aware that even GNOME has had it's own share
>> of bad translation coordinators for certain languages, and they have
>> only been changed when someone else stepped forward.
>
> I don't see how this is relevant. This is about fixing a problem that
> occurs for certain languages where Ubuntu overrides the upstream
> languages.

Olav, thanks for putting this outside context.  This was in response
to Djihed about how is this a social issue.  Ubuntu has a share of bad
translation coordinators, just like GNOME does.  And bad coordinators
lead to bad translations.  That's how it's relevant.  With all the
good coordinators in Launchpad, we wouldn't even be having this
discussion.

I see all this as pretty similar to disallowing distributions to patch
software.  People have learned to live with that (even if I'd prefer
myself to see the GNOME foot in the corner of my screen and not the
Ubuntu logo, or the GNOME log out screen), and have learned to live
with bugs being reported against upstream when they are only relevant
to distributions.  This is not only a problem of Ubuntu, this is a
problem of any other distribution.  The specific problem of Ubuntu is
that they are also patching translations.  This reiterates the same
problems in a new context.  So, the problem is that some of those
"patches" are bad.  That's something we can work on.  We can't work on
the premise that all patches are bad.


Cheers,
Danilo