Hello,
I've not been involved in this review effort, just wanting to add a
detail which might get missed.
On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 08:50:28AM +0100, Daniel Baumann wrote:
> On 11/15/2011 07:19 AM, Christian PERRIER wrote:
>> And, of course, I also regret the
>> poor wording of these extra templates, which lintian does send
>> warnings for (particularly interrogative form in long descriptions).
>> It's not like it's your first debconf templates..:-)
>
> again, i see nothing wrong in adding them and improving them at a later
> point.
The "problem" is that there are many l10n teams in Debian and
fortunately more and more active ones. These teams, however, often
have very limited man power and many are struggeling to keep up to
date. Many teams also have a notification system, telling them about
new strings, i.e. work to be done, automatically. After a translation
often a review process starts, involving more people.
Lets be conservative and say we have 7 languages currently which try
to stay up to date (some of them with very few people, as I
understood). Each gets an alert about the updated template, starts
working and review. Assume that only one person is involved in a
review, and that the review generates 3 mails (conservative). Since
often tricky issues are discussed (translation of technical texts is
not easy nor uncontroversial), these e-mails are not quick ones to
write/respond to. So we have at least two people per language with at
least three e-mails, i.e. 14 people worked and 21 e-mails generated
(at minimum), probably more involved in many cases (and more languages
working on them as well).
So *from a translators point of view* it would be great if templates
could be reviewed first as much as possible, i.e. before any upload to
unstable happens (experimental is fine, though). It is by no means
necessary from this viewpoint to actually include updated translation
in the initial upload (i.e. delay an upload for them, but see next paragraph).
*From a (non english speaking) user point of view* a translation
should be included as soon as possible, because Debconf messages are
usually shown only once. Bearing in mind that no review is perfect,
having them early (i.e. seen by many speakers of that language) also
enables improvements/bug reports before a stable release of Debian
might occur.
Now, looking at this issue *from a maintainer point of view* (although
my packages do not have any templates) I understand that there are
times when an upload must happen very quickly and without enough time
for review (e.g. when the ssh-blacklist had to be introduced).
However, a brief e-mail to debian-l10n-english (please have a look at
my templates) and debian-i18n (please do not work on these templates
yet) would not cause much extra work, maybe including the statement
"I'm short on time, right now". If possible, it would be great, if
a call for translation[1] could be issued once the template has been
stablized then, and an upload aiming for testing could be prepared
with those translations included.
So, two e-mails and after review / stabilization one program
call[1] or an e-mail to debian-i18n ("templates are ready for
translation, feel free to go ahead"), followed by a period of 10 days,
followed by preparing a simple upload with only N updated files
(N currently around 7-10, see above for the numbers).
Hopefully this helps understand the issue better. Again I would like
to stress, though, that I did not follow the current issue at hand so
it is difficult for me to assess it, though in the past Christian has
done an *excellent* job taking over some (often almost all) steps in
the above processes from maintainers (who often were fine or at least
indifferent). So he might have missed a detail in a description, might
have worded an e-mail different than he wanted once in a while.
In German, we say (freely translated): A craftsman working causes
particles flying around (»Wo gehobelt wird, fallen Späne«). I just
learned that the english expression is: You have to break an egg to
make an omelette.
Hopefully this clears things up a little.
Greetings
Helge
[1] With the tool podebconf-report-po this is actually one programm
call, no additional/manual work required.
--
Dr. Helge Kreutzmann debian@helgefjell.de
Dipl.-Phys. http://www.helgefjell.de/debian.php
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