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Re: "Debian Community celebrates its 19th birthday" announcement. Please review and translate.



On 2012-08-13 10:17, Victor Nițu wrote:
Hi,

We are ending this announcements wave with a Debian Birthday
Announcement. You are now welcome to review and translate, the plan is
to send it on Thursday (16 August).


The anonscm URL for viewing the current revision is:

http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/publicity/announcements/en/2012/2012-08-16-debian-day-part2.wml?view=markup


Thanks!



Hi Victor, and thank you very much for this. Here are some comments.

First, we need to decide the target audience for this announcement. Do we phrase this as a press release or as just a featured news item? It looks like we want this to be a press release, in which case we should pay attention to accessibility and minimize the use of jargon.
Here are specific remarks:


The
current<q>unstable</q>  branch consists of more than 37,000 binary packages
for the amd64 architecture alone - over 46 GB of Free/Libre Software!

While this must be correct, in terms of accessibility, this is jargon-heavy ("unstable", "binary packages", "amd64").

Since last year's birthday new steps to portability have been made;
<a href="http://www.debian.org/ports/";>11 official ports</a>  are now available,
amongst which Debian/kFreeBSD deserves a special mention for successfully
integrating a non-Linux kernel within the project.

If we consider GNU/kFreeBSD as an official port, it was already official last year.

Debian 7.0, codenamed Wheezy, was frozen in July 2012, following a time-based freeze policy,
and currently the main activity throughout the project is squashing the
remaining RC bugs.

Some technicalities here: "time-based freeze policy", "RC"

Besides more than 1,000 Debian Developers and Maintainers from all over the globe,
there are in excess of 12,000 registered accounts for the
<a href="http://alioth.debian.org/";>Alioth collaboration platform</a>, and that
doesn't even include all those people contributing with<a href="http://i18n.debian.org/";>translations</a>
or<a href="http://www.debian.org/Bugs/";>bug reports</a>  (and sometimes patches for them)
and all those users helping others via our<a href="http://www.debian.org/MailingLists/";>mailing lists</a>,
<a href="http://forums.debian.net/";>forums</a>  and<a href="http://wiki.debian.org/IRC/";>IRC channels</a>.

I'm not very comfortable with presenting Alioth accounts as contributors. Do we have a list of these accounts (and - ideally - of each account's activity)? For sure, even legitimate accounts on Alioth do not necessarily contribute to Debian (Alioth projects do not necessarily contribute to Debian). Furthermore, many Alioth accounts belong to Debian Developers and Debian Maintainers.
Also, forums.debian.net only has unofficial forums.
As a project, we would also like to take this opportunity to thank all our
users and contributors, and of course our upstream developers. All of
them are helping to make Debian a great experience and a great project!

I think of upstream developers as contributors (even though their contribution might be involuntary). Also, I'm not a native English speaker, but I find it strange to call Debian an experience.

The Debian Project continues to
<a href="http://www.debian.org/intro/help";>  welcome contributions</a>
in all forms, from everyone, encouraging people to download, use, modify
and distribute its source code hoping that it will prove useful.

This seems to say that using Debian's source code is a contribution, which is far-stretched. Finally, isn't it redundant to encourage people to download the source code? What good would it do to download if it's not to use, modify or distribute?


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