Let me just share my experience with translations. For a long time I had a
hell of a time getting complete translations for base-config, even though I
thought it was kind of important. It is after all, one of the first things
everyone sees during a new install. I tried to be as responsive as
possible to bugs with translations (and other like Denis helped), I
posted pleas for translations to the lists several times, etc. And I had
perhaps 3 or 4 not quite complete translatons.
Then I moved it from cvs.debian.org to alioth, and mentioned this on the
debian-boot list and added all interested translators to the project. Now a
month later, the released version is fully translated to ~20 languages.
Yesterday, I committed a string change with this in debian/changelog:
* Joey Hess
- List the number of available packages in apt-setup/another.
Today I cvs upped and noticed the following added after it:
* Te�³filo Ruiz Su�¡rez [1]
- Fixed Spanish translation (po/es.po)
* Christian Perrier
- run debconf-updatepo
- Fixed french translation (debian/po/fr.po)
* Bart Cornelis
- Updated Dutch translation (debian/po/nl.po)
- fixs translation-bugs found by Bastiaan van Eeckhoudt
* Ognyan Kulev
- Updated bulgarian translation (debian/po/bg.po).
* Claus Hindsgaul
- Update Danish translation (da.po).
* Konstantinos Margaritis
- Updated Greek translation (el.po)
* Dennis Stampfer
- Updated German translation (de.po).
* Miguel Figueiredo
- Updated portuguese translation (pt.po)
* AndrÃ?© LuÃ?Âs Lopes
- Updated Brazilian Portuguese (pt_BR) translation.
That's pretty seriously cool for less than 24 hours. Sure, there have been
problems; some mistakes in the French translation combined with some new,
non-robust code managed to break base-config for French. But obviously
something has started going right for base-config's translations. I'm quite
sure that the move to alioth, plus the debian-installer string freeze, were
responsible.
Now I'm trying to work out how to achieve similar success with others of
my packages. This may result in me moving a fair amount of stuff from my
personal server to alioth (though hopefully _not_ back to cvs..). I
suspect though that some more infrastructure will be needed to have
similar succees with, say, debconf. It would be nice to not have to
manage adding translators to the project, and just be able to add some
kind of translation group that includes all our translators. And then
there would need to be some way for that group to keep track of the
packages whose translations it maintains, and this group would have to
be motivated to work on packages outside debian-installer, which our
current group of d-i translators may not be.
Anyway, I'm obviously leaning a lot toward revision control with direct
commit access for translators, and away from both the debian BTS as a
way to get translations in, as well as away from the kind of idea
proposed in the head of this thread.
--
see shy jo
[1] Apologies for probably mangling this uft-8 encoded name in this email.
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