Re: bug-reporting for non-English users
Il giorno sab, 30-04-2005 alle 13:39 +0200, Jacob Sparre Andersen ha
scritto:
> Keld Jørn Simonsen wrote:
> > Jutta Wrage wrote:
>
> A part of the effectiveness of the Open Source community is
> how we do massively parallel testing. If we move the task
> of checking if an error in a program is already known from
> the testers to the developers, then this system breaks. So
> we have to keep the developer-side of the system looking the
> same (just with even more testers reporting errors).
>
> > > - - translate everything related to bug reports
>
> Bug-reports have a completely different time-scale than user
> interface texts in the programs (much faster). Can we
> handle that enormous extra translation load?
I don't think so. We may invest more time in explaining how to
report a bug in such way that a maintainer could understand it:
. use LC_ALL=C LANG=C before running the buggy program
. ask for translation help in debian-l10n-<LANG> or
debian-<LANG> or IRC before reporting
and we may even focus on being sure that the bug wasn't already
reported, using smarter and/or transation-aware tools.
[...]
> > 3. If the maintainer gets a bug report in a language that
> > is not understood by the maintainer, there should be
> > established ways of contacting a translator for the
> > language in question to get the bug report translated. To
> > facilitate this, a form for reporting bugs should indicate
> > the language used for reporting .
>
> The maintainer should _never_ get bug-reports in other
> languages than English. (at least not in that role)
I think this may be the simplest solution: leave the user the
possibility to write in any language and let the maintainer, if he
doesn't understand that language, the option to ask for a translation on
a debian-l10n list. This is the lesser impact solution.
Why the maintainer shouldn't receive a non english report? It may even
be a bug that only happens in a localized environment. It may be a
language known to the maintainer. The only reason may be to make this
report available to a wider range of readers, but the really important
reader is just the maintainer.
Bye,
Giuseppe
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