Hi All,
Yes, but others prefer to have files available as early as possible. That's why we have the "official" translation rounds plus unofficial "pre-rounds".
Yes, we like pre-rounds, but this is not good for quality work because the codes are changing and we are not sure which svn revision of the translation include the build. Pre-rounds is good to translate blind as much as we can. So again: we need pre-rounds and we like it.
However, I'm not complaining about necessary corrections but about continuous and unnecessary, mainly cosmetic or formal, changes to strings.
Those changes were only allowed (and announced in advance) for the package management stack (zypper, etc.). Sometimes those minor changes slip in while developers are fixing a serious bug -- that's kind of annoying for the translators but hopefully tolerable.
In that case we should slip the release date, because now it sounds the bug fix much more important than the localization. But the truth is both of them needed for a good distribution. When we steal the time from localization for bug fix we lose the quality on the other side. Why we don't change the release date in that case? We need exact dates, deadlines for all kind of packages in the distribution. E.g. I really don't know the new gnome localizations will be in the GMC or not, because it looks it will be pulled from the gnome svn only once. But when? I am working with the Gnome, KDE and other translators and we can help to each others when we have deadlines. But this is black box for us. This is the 5th SUSE version where I try to do my best, but most of the time I am still guess how the whole thing works.
Probably a dedicated (one week?) translation period close to the RC1 or final release would improve things, but I think it would be interesting to read other translators' opinion.
RC1 is too late--if you'd miss that date, there would not be a second chance. The last beta is actually already rather late, because there are several hops involved until translations are on the installation media.
We have to change that. Or Alpha builds should be for bug fixes and Beta for localization and other test.
Ladislav has some ideas how we could automate this step more, but writing and testing the scripts takes time, In theory, that's easy: just 'cp', 'tar', and submit the package. But in practice we probably must run several checks on the results; for example, only propose the package for submisssion to the build system if be have better translations.
Good news. We are waiting for the new process. thanks kalman -- Kalman Kemenczy senior consultant SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 Your Linux is ready http://www.novell.hu --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-translation+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-translation+help@opensuse.org