Hi, > I keep on thinking we are speaking about the same kind of list. You can > add so called prospective packages to the list of existing packages: Ok, obviously I did not understand your notice then :). The purpose of your notice was to tell that it's possible to mix package description and package lists using the indicated format and tools, wasn't it? > The idea is to use metapackages on the live CD. The advantage is that > the metapackage creation procedure is verifying the availability of a > package once it is created. So in the long run maintaining the > metapackages is less work for with the additional profit of having > several QA tools and the web sentinel pages (where I created the > examples for). Ok. What we could easily do as a start, is creating new meta-packages in Debian Jr. that are just our package lists. This way we would not spend to much time on thinking how to mix/split/purge/rename the existing lists (the main reason why I still haven't merged our lists into Jr). These lists may keep the prefix doudoulinux so that people easily know what it is about (and this would explain the existing redundancies with Jr packages). > You might like to try filing a bug report with your translation patch to > the Debian bug tracking system. If the maintainer of the package might > include this at least into the Debian package you will not have > additional work. May be he even forwards the patch upstream. It seems the first step for us to get things better done is to produce sets of language patch files for apps (as Per proposed). We may then send them to upstream directly or to Debian maintainers, I don't think this really mind as the way to proceed is the same: writing an email. I'll try to discuss with one of our contributor who is caring about the issue of contributing translations upstream. > I agree > that your translators doing a lot of work but doing it for DoudouLinux > exclusively is somehow in contrary to the cooperation principle of Free > Software and thus not sustainable. It is still publicly available though ;). Some time ago I told some upstream projects where are our translations, but it did not seem to be used afterwards. They'd probably prefer us to participate directly to their projects. > You personally confirmed beeing > short of time. Simply assume you might become even shorter of time and > your children will grow up so you personal motivation in creating a > children distribution might fade away. You're perfectly right, this is why I'm indeed working to find ways to fund the project. I believe that without solid funding, such project cannot live for real and reach its objectives, it can only stay a small, marginal project, or even stop. I believe there is an audience for a system designed with children fulfillment in mind, without ads, without hidden operations behind user's back, many people agree with that. So it'd be a pity to collapse instead. However over the past 3 years I saw that, the more it grows, the less I can do administrative tasks: we don't hire enough. So I have to concentrate on the most vital tasks. Also the goal, ideally, would be to get some contributors paid directly or indirectly by the project, not necessarily full time. This way we would be able to have a stable workforce base and this is probably the only way to get it. For your information, we've signed an agreement in November with a company/association in Paris that is about to sell refurbished computers with DoudouLinux while giving a small fee to our non-profit association for each sell. I'm currently discussing with another company in Lyon about an online version of DoudouLinux to be paid for (on VM's in a datacenters, it is not official yet but I've been told I can already announce it). Finally, my contacts in the French national education agreed few days ago to help us if we setup a crowd funding project aiming at offering a DoudouLinux tablet. There is a strong demand for such product and we cannot offer anything yet for several reasons. Not having a tablet would mean excluding ourself from a large part of devices in a near future. We really need to develop this part of the project but have too little free time for it. > Once DoudouLinux might not be > maintained any more (just assuming for a moment) all the huge work of > the translators might be done for the dustbin if it is not propagated to > the place where it really belongs to. So spending a fraction of time to > getting things done right might have the effort of getting less work > done but its done in a sustainable way. This eventuality is not impossible of course. Anyway, project maintained or not, the huge work of our maintainers is currently not back propagated. It's not that different unfortunately! Note that it is not a fraction of time that is required since we have 75 user applications in DoudouLinux, plus the environment and minus our own applications… But I'll try to find someone motivated by the opportunity to contribute upstream. For us this is also a way to make our project better accepted by the community as a whole. We've always been believing it. > Please do NOT write another translation tool. There are others out > there and the most knowledge about these tools can be obtained from > debian-i18n@lists.debian.org. Please make sure you will not spend > your time in reinventing the wheel. Sorry I was referring to the discussion on our lists. A proposal was to write new tools to ease the transfer of translations between Transifex and a running DoudouLinux, which is not easy currently. An issue about translator motivation is that they must wait for next minor release of DoudouLinux to see their work live. It'd be better if they can get their work in the live environment immediately, and check for possible mistakes. -- Cheers, JM.
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