Re: String freeze

[barbier@linuxfr.org (Denis Barbier)]

On Tue, Jan 13, 2004 at 11:28:04AM +0000, Colin Watson wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 13, 2004 at 07:18:32AM +0100, Christian Perrier wrote:
> > Quoting Denis Barbier (barbier@linuxfr.org):
> > > Sounds fair.  I will go through the BTS and collect l10n related
> > > bugreports so that they can be worked on.  If there are other people
> > 
> > How the hell will you do this as there is no "i18n" tag in the BTS
> > (wild wide ranting)?
> 
> OK, enough already please.
> 
> If the i18n tag were added to the BTS, would there immediately be
> requests for i18n-fr, i18n-de, etc. (or l10n-, more sensibly) tags?

Here are some situations about l10n bugs:
  * A maintainer (or NMUer) might want to identify all l10n bugs against
    one (or all) of his packages, because they can easily be fixed.  The
    maintainer can rewrite subjects to fit his own mark policy, but
    NMUer cannot.  When packages have a reasonable amount of bugs,
    reading the whole list is not a big deal.
  * A translator might want to keep an eye on his bugreports about l10n.
    If he only submits l10n related bugreports, this is feasible.
    Otherwise this is also feasible if he has a bugreport template,
    unless maintainers did rewrite subject fields.
  * A translation team might want to keep an eye on all bugreports about
    this language.  This is hardly feasible today, there are always
    people translating outside of the translation team.  So even if
    a bugreport template is edicted, some bugreports won't have the
    right subject field.
  * An i18n team might want to keep an eye on all bugreports about
    all languages to follow.  This can be hardly automated today.

If we want the string freeze as described by Anthony Towns for sarge,
we need a i18n tag so that bug detection can be automated.
Of course current bugs must be manually sorted out in order to tag
them properly, I am working on this and have collected around 600
bugreports.
We will in the future want to be able to distinguish between languages,
but IMO this is not as urgent as a l10n dedicated tag and can be
discussed later.

So I think that I agree with Javier, and am for a i18n tag which
takes all i18n/l10n related bugs under his wing, and metadata is
the way to go to specify languages, but this is less urgent.

Denis