Hi fellow DDs, First of all, I wish you all a happy New Year (at least for those who have started it recently). On behalf of the contributors to Debian internationalisation (i18n) [0], I would like to bring to your attention the fact that there are still many packages that have had translations submitted for them and are sitting on the BTS waiting for the maintainer to upload them (or for somebody to make an NMU) [1], even after Christian Perrier's NMU campaign [2] which handled around 300 different packages. As we are on 'freeze' now and one of the things DDs *can* do during the freeze is to upload new translations (or translation updates), we would like to ask all Debian Developers to please upload all translations or translation updates available in the BTS as soon as possible. Once done, please ask debian-release to approve the changes and make a freeze exception for the packages you uploaded. If you do not include any other changes (like changes that are not allowed during the freeze) there are very high changes the RMs will allow the exception. That way users (our priority) which are not fluent in English would have a chance to configure their systems using their native tongue. Thanks to the work of the translation teams many different users can now do a base installation of Debian on their mother language [3] and we would like to extend this as much as possible. If possible, we would like you also to: * use the 'podebconf-report-po' tool (available in the po-debconf package) to notify old translators in case there have been some changes in the packages' templates that demand a translation update. * ask in the debian-i18n mailing list for new translations before any of these uploads. If there is an upload going to happen soon for a package some translation team coordinators might take some time off their busy schedule [4] to provide you with a translation into a new language. That way, your uploads will include as many languages as possible. * give some time (a week) for updates and new translations to arrive before making an upload. * for PO translations of non-native Debian packages, forward the translation to upstream so new versions of the software will carry the new translations (or fixes) provided in Debian's BTS. That would reduce the number of uploads required to fix l10n-related bugs, as it would reduce the chances of a package being uploaded fixing l10n bugs and receiving a new l10n bug shortly after. We would be really happy if all the Debian Developers made uploads to try to fix *all* outstanding l10n-bugs before the Debian 4.0 'etch' release. Unfortunately, there are many packages with l10n bugs open, some even having bugs over a year old and some having over 5 different translations waiting for inclusion in the BTS [5]. Having l10n bugs open for such a long time certainly disheartens translators! Most of the work done by translation teams will be useless if the result of their work, be them po-debconf translations, review to PO files or fixes to existing translations are sitting in the BTS and do not get applied until *after* the release. Thank you! Javier Fernández-Sanguino [0] Contributor A: What shall we call ourselves this time? Contributor B: The i18n team? Contributor C: But I'm not a member! Contributor B: The i18n Task Force? Contributor D: Do I have a task to do? Contributor B: The i18n Crowd? The CROWD : Burn the witch! Contributor C: How about "The knights of Nicky-Nicky"? [1] Full list is of l10n bugs is (mirrored, 2007/01/03) at: http://people.debian.org/~jfs/i18n/i18n-bugs.html (unfortunately, it's not easy to group by package or sort by popularity without doing some perl-foo) [2] Which started in october last year until december, and focused on packages that have at least one pending l10n bug since more than 100 days. These packages are sorted according to popularity and age on http://people.debian.org/~lwall/i18n/ It followed the procedure described in http://people.debian.org/~lwall/i18n/nmu/ [3] See http://d-i.alioth.debian.org/l10n-stats/ The initial (d-i) installation is fully translated to 56 languages and the base installation is fully translated to 22. [4] Many are now busy updating the translations of the D-i manual and Release Notes. [5] There are 1274 l10n bugs (412 of these over a year old, ~800 with a patch) and 600 of the total follow the [INTL:xx] format so they are most probably po-debconf translations which are waiting for inclusion. The following list is sorted by the number of l10n bugs: http://people.debian.org/~jfs/i18n/i18n-bugs-sorted.txt Note that some of the l10n bugs are *not* po-debconf. You can regenerate the summary with the following script: http://people.debian.org/~jfs/i18n/generate-summary.sh
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