On Sun, Jun 05, 2005 at 07:55:28PM +0200, Christian Rose wrote:
l?r 2005-06-04 klockan 19:44 -0700 skrev Bryce Harrington:
Judging from http://l10n-status.gnome.org/gnome-2.12/index.html, GNOME has 52 languages that have translation ratios over 50%.
...Sodipodi in GNOME CVS currently has translations into 41 languages, whereas Inkscape has 33. Since I think Inkscape has become much more wellknown than Sodipodi, I think an estimation of about 50 languages can certainly be reasonable, given some time of course.
Essentially it is up to the teams to decide how they organize their work. The first one that volunteers for translating into a particular language gets to do that, and may become the coordinator for that language if he or she does want that. Then we direct all further volunteers for that language to get in contact with their coordinator first -- we do not accept any translations without approval from the coordinator for the affected language. This may sound harsh, but it helps build up teams and get volunteers to cooperate in their teams, and encourages some sort of peer review.
... From your description, it sounds like you are asking whether there would be some way for us to synchronize po files with Inkscape, and incorporating Inkscape into the GNOME Translation Project, without Inkscape actually moving to GNOME CVS. The answer is simple: no. The more verbose explanation for this is that we've tried this many times in the past...
It sounds like a very effective process. The GNOME Translation Project appears to do very good work, and it looks like Inkscape could potentially pick up perhaps 20 more language translations. I would really like to find a way to work together, because it sounds like it would be in all of our benefit.
I spoke with several of the Inkscape developers, and unfortunately it seems there is not much interest in switching CVS providers. There would be strong interest in switching to a Gnome Subversion, though, if it becomes available. If we go through the process of changing sourcecode management systems, we'd like to do it just once, and going from CVS to CVS doesn't seem worth the trouble, even if it would eventually gain some more translators.
It sounds like many of our translators participate in both Inkscape and GTP already, so perhaps if having increased translations for Inkscape is important, in the interim before Subversion becomes available, you could make other translators aware of the need, and they could also choose to participate on a case by case basis if they wish.
Nothing is actually decided yet, and it is a sensitive decision that must be handled by the community. However, I think most contributors are supporting a change. The "only" thing that remains is making a formal community decision, deciding what solution we want to move to. Furthermore, key contributors have testified that they want to make sure a decision actually gets made, so that a change can actually happen.
Would you mind communicating Inkscape's interest in participating in this, if a decision is made and implemented? Also, if you could keep us informed of its progress that would probably help a lot.
But I don't see this as a reason not to switch now. The current situation is no worse than what you have right now, and there will be a change for something better in the future.
Well, keep in mind that a change would be disruptive, impose new risks, and would take time and effort to go through. I'm not sure how we'd preserve CVS history. It sounds like we'd lose some ability to ensure people get CVS access quickly. Developers would also have to redo their local trees and branches, to make them point at the new CVS. We don't know about the performance / stability of the Gnome CVS (we had problems with SourceForge early on, but things are much better today). We'd have to revise cron jobs and scripts that currently work on the SF CVS. We have some tools like our document generator that run on the SF web server, which can *only* access SF CVS, that we'd have to either rewrite or lose.
So you can see that switching to Gnome CVS would impose transition costs. Since we'll have to do all this work anyway when we move to Subversion, I think the general feeling is, why do this work twice, if we can simply wait until Subversion becomes available?
Bryce