Re: bug-reporting for non-English users
Giuseppe Sacco ha scritto:
> Il giorno sab, 30-04-2005 alle 13:39 +0200, Jacob Sparre
> Andersen ha scritto:
> > The maintainer should _never_ get bug-reports in other
> > languages than English. (at least not in that role)
>
> I think this may be the simplest solution: leave the user
> the possibility to write in any language and let the
> maintainer, if he doesn't understand that language, the
> option to ask for a translation on a debian-l10n list.
> This is the lesser impact solution.
No.
a) Most maintainers know less than 10 languages. And
Debian is distributed in (more than?) 30 languages.
This gives (as a very rough estimate) that two out of
three messages the maintainer receives will be in a
language he/she doesn't know. Given the same estimate
for the bug-reporters, they will only understand one out
of three reports in the database. This will thus result
in two out of three bug-reports the maintainers receive
being duplicates of existing reports.
b) Because maintainers change. And even though one
maintainer of a package may understands Italian, it is
not very likely that the next one does. If we don't
stick to the one language we all have to know anyway
(because it is the official language of the project)
for the internal communications of the project - of
which the bug database is a very important part - we
create a great mess.
> Why the maintainer shouldn't receive a non english report?
> It may even be a bug that only happens in a localized
> environment. It may be a language known to the maintainer.
> The only reason may be to make this report available to a
> wider range of readers, but the really important reader is
> just the maintainer.
What people write in private e-mails to Debian developers is
no concern of mine, but the information in the bug database
is something I have to read quite often. And even though
I'm pretty close to the 10-language-mark, I would still
ignore two thirds of the bug-reports, when trying to see if
I had found a new problem. I may be strange, but I
completely ignore bug-reports in languages I don't know -
they are just spam to me.
Ciao,
Jacob
--
"Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead."
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