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 64bit GNU powered gpg signed mail preferred Help keep free software "libre": http://www.ffii.de/
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