On Thu, Apr 05, 2007 at 11:39:24AM +0200, Jens Seidel wrote: > Of course I know that it was anounced that the Relase Notes stabilized > and it is save to translate it without expecting major updates and > rewrites but this is no reason to delay information you consider > important! The "delay" here is ficticious. We've had many months (four months) to provide a final version of the Release Notes. This tidbit of information should have been there a month ago, not the week before the release. Courtesy to translators means providing "stable" documents that they can work on, not moving targets. Unfortunately, this has not been as good as it could have been for the Release Notes and I would rather not introduce any other (even if minor) change at this point in time. We've already had complaints in -i18n related to the Release Notes. Do you want to risk actually *losing* translators because we are not able to uphold our promise? (that promise was, yesterday, "we will not touch the RN to let you guys work on it") > It's again this stupid "no fully translation ==> no publication" which > avoids to inform the user about facts, right? No, we are trying to provide a stable document so it can get fully translated. In any case, for the Release Notes "not fully translated" could mean (for non-PO-based translations) "out of date" and in some cases publishing out of date translations could lead to misleading information (and consequently, problematic upgrades). Anyway, this is such a minor issue that I'm really surprised you bring it up. We've actually delayed a number of days (at least four) a "stable" version of the document in order to document many of the pending bugs and provide a good set of Release Notes for etch. > It would be the first DDP document which incapacitates the user by > deciding whether the reader is forced to read the up to date English > document or a (maybe only slightly) outdated translation. No it isn't. I've disabled outdated translations for documents I maintain [1], and I expect other DDP authors to do the same. In many situations an outdated translations does more harm than good. If *all* DDP translations were switched to PO-file based translations the situation might change, as outdated information would not be shown (it would be shown only in english). As this is not the case, I think we have to keep the current policy and drop "out of date" translations in many situations. Regards Javier [1] Painfully, this included even the Spanish translation for the Debian Security Manual, even if I'm both the Spanish translation coordinator and the document's main author.
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