Re: [RANT] French translation for debconf templates stucked at 90% : analysis

[martin.quinson@free.fr]

Selon Christian Perrier <bubulle@debian.org>:

> 
> <troll size="huge">There is a conspiracy against translators and
> translation teams

Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence.
  -- Napoleon
</troll>

> For instance, the current debconf translation statistics give 90% as
> the translation ratio for debconf templates in French. This ratio is
> constant for months despite the daily efforts of the team.
> 
> Indeed, this should be near 98-99%. The remaining  8-9% are just
> sitting in the BTS.

Dude, I understand that you're pissed of by the current situation, I get that
feeling sometimes, but you forgot to mention one of the main reason for that fact.

Last january, the french translation team had a ratio of about 98%, the 2
missing percents seeming to be impossible to get, due to some packagers actively
refusing to do translation-only uploads (Stephen Frost comes to mind, hi there).

But this ratio was only about the new gettext based translations. So, I decided
to provide patches to packagers still providing debconf-utils based debconf
packages. For memory, this is deprecated since version 1.2.28 of debconf,
released on Sat, 22 Feb 2003 14:23:16 -0500.

So, I started submitting patches to those packages. When I begun (2 Feb 2004),
there was 246 such packages, 57 of them having a reported bug about that. Now,
"only" 133 packages use debconf without po-debconf, and there is 91 openned bug
repports (I was waiting to find the time to prepare the 44 missing patches
before launching the "discution", but Christian was quicker...)

The collateral dammage was to let the amount of stuff to translate grow by more
than 50%...

So, yeah. To all the reasons mentionned in this tread to explain the drop of
statistics despite translator efforts, we have to add my own effort to get ride
of a system deprecated since almost one year and half...


Thanks for your time, Mt.