Re: bug-reporting for non-English users
Giuseppe Sacco skrivaði:
> Il giorno dom, 01-05-2005 alle 14:50 +0200, Jacob Sparre
> Andersen ha scritto:
> > 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.
>
> Well, this would be true if we could leave every user the
> freedom to report a bug in any language he would like. I
> would rather prefer to ask them to report in English, if
> possible. This would led as to, probably, the majority of
> reports in English.
Maybe. But how many maintainers would be happy if even 1/3
of the bug-reports they received were in a (to them)
incomprehensible language?
And what about the other users? Do you expect the users to
try to understand bug-reports in 30+ different languages
before they report an error? I expect that the result will
be that people just give up looking through the existing
bug-reports. If we're lucky they will still report the bugs
and we will just get duplicate bug-reports in an excessive
volume. If we're unlucky they will decide that it is too
much work to report bugs to Debian and we will never hear
from them.
> > 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.
>
> Right. That's why any maintainer should ask
> debian-l10n-<LANG> for a translation of a report, if he
> needs one.
Why not send the bug-reports directly to debian-l10n-<LANG>
(or maybe rather debian-bugs-<LANG>, since the task is
slightly different) then? That way we will avoid polluting
the bug-database with bugs in 30+ different languages.
> And this translation could be to English or to any other
> language he likes.
You completely ignore that it isn't only the maintainer who
reads bug-reports.
> > 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.
>
> I would probably tell the submitter that I don't
> understand his language. I would also ask d-l10n-<LANG>
> for a translation.
What is the chance that the submitter would understand this?
And why not send the non-English bug-reports _directly_ to
the translators/verifiers for that language? What is the
problem with separating out the tasks? And would you really
like to have to sift through bug-reports in Sardinian,
Icelandic, Welsh and Faroese, when you are checking if a bug
you've found already has been reported?
Vinarligst,
Jacob
--
"Very small. Go to sleep" -- monster (not drooling)
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