Re: Import from Launchpad

[Olav Vitters <olav bkor dhs org>]

On Tue, Feb 05, 2008 at 02:50:17PM +0100, Danilo Šegan wrote:
> >> > 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.

Not my intention.

> 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.

Ok, just for the GNOME parts of a language.

> 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.

I know. However, it was raised directly various times. Perhaps not to
the right person/team. However, I do think the issue was known.

> > 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.

I mean: lock a language for GNOME.

E.g. lock 'dutch' for 'GNOME' only. Not the whole of GNOME. Not the
whole Dutch translations, just the combination.

> 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.

Ok, so we need a fix for that.

> > 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.

Launchpad is fine for other programs. However, it should provide the
locking mechanism for a specific language for a project (as said above).
I think you are saying that it is being worked on. If so, good.

[..]
> 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.

I'm just trying to show what impact the current situation has on e.g.
the Dutch translation team. It is not about where the bug reports are
filed. It is the bad quality and the impression that a GNOME translation
team caused it.

> 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.

That was due to bug-buddy sucking. We did want those bugreports.. but we
failed to have a process that added the debug symbols. It still sucks
btw, but fortunately 'you' handle the mess now.

> > | 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).

I'm not involved with either translation or Ubuntu, so I don't know if I
know them. The intention is not to lock the *Dutch* language, only the
Dutch GNOME translations.

> 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 missed the 'currently technically difficult to create what you
propose'. You do agree to provide that functionality (lock only e.g.
dutch gnome stuff) at one point?

> 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.

Good! :-)

How long do you expect this to be implemented and put into production?

> 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 can understand cooperation on short term if there will be a long term
fix.

[..]
> 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

Some of those patches I can understand. Mandriva only adds the bare
minimum of patches (probably focusses more on KDE). However, patches are
sometimes needed.

> 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.

Except that for translations it seems like a free for all. Distributions
are free to change things. However, quality control shouldn't go out the
window. Plus the people who change stuff should be guided + know what
they are doing. A terrible translation is worse than no translation at
all.
But if it has been proven that the Dutch GNOME team is competent, then
Launchpad should at one point allow these translations to be locked.


Aside from technical difficulty, is this high on the priority list? I'd
like to limit any delay only due to technical difficulties.

-- 
Regards,
Olav