[fdo] Re: On translation regressions due to freedesktop.org dependencies

[Daniel Stone]

(Please CC me on all replies: I am not subscribed.)

XDG people, this is the referenced email:
http://lists.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2004-July/msg00491.html

On Tue, Jul 27, 2004 at 01:36:58AM +0200, Christian Rose wrote:
> There have unfortunately been significant regressions now in translation
> coverage as we are in the phase of moving over to using freedesktop.org
> technologies inside GNOME, like recently with the MIME system, the MIME
> types and their translatable names and descriptions.
> 
> Unfortunately, there's no short-time solution to this in sight as far as
> I can see, and it looks like this will be the case not only in the short
> GNOME 2.8 time frame, but beyond that aswell. The problem is mostly an
> administrative one, and not a minor one mind you, which is why it looks
> difficult to resolve.
> 
> This is basically the problem:
> 
> While some key developers have access to freedesktop.org CVS in order to
> be able to maintain their software, many other contributors have not.
> This includes translators.
> 
> [...]

(freedesktop hat on)

Hi guys,
Let me start out by saying translations are a hard problem - a massively
hard problem. It's not that no-one wants to fix it, it's just that I'm
honestly not sure how.

fd.o doesn't govern most of our member projects; we consider ourselves a
little more like SourceForge like GNOME in that regard (and that regard
only, it must be stressed). They ask for projects, we create them. They
ask for new users, we add them. They ask for services, usually that
request is fulfilled. The only power we wield is the fact that we're
root on the machines in question.

Therein lies the problem: only a very small number of people can access
all the CVS repositories, and even then I would consider this a severe
violation of trust and invasion of privacy, because it involves using
sudo. Which is wrong, and bad.

We also don't dictate policies or mechanisms to our projects, which
includes not dictating who they add to their projects. Thus, we don't go
around giving all translators global access. This may change, but it
would require the consent of all projects: no offence meant to any
translators, of course, but this access is important - there are a lot
of projects hosted on fd.o, and giving a few people commit access to all
of them is like a blank cheque.

So, IMO, giving all translators CVS access isn't really a solution.

What is?

(I don't know.)

One possibility is having a i18n module with a structure such that it
can be overlaid over member projects, and performing the necessary
CVS-fu to make this happen (e.g. you check out dbus, and dbus/ comes
from /cvs/dbus/dbus, and dbus/i18n or whatever comes from
/cvs/i18n/dbus).

... I can't really think of much else.

If there is clear consensus on a solution, I'm willing to set aside a
couple of hours *tomorrow* to make this happen. I can see how this is a
time-critical problem, and am prepared to put in the effort to see it
resolved.

So, if you have any questions/comments/whatever, please reply (remember
to CC me), or catch me on IRC as daniels.

Cheers,
:) d

-- 
Daniel Stone                                            <daniel at freedesktop.org>
freedesktop.org: powering your desktop                http://www.freedesktop.org
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