2016-02-11 23:21 GMT+01:00 Tobias Ellinghaus <houz@...173...>:

Am Donnerstag, 11. Februar 2016, 19:35:38 schrieb Christoffer Holmstedt:

[giant quote]

> Of course, a bump in the major version number
> would require manual intervention for such a release, but that shouldn't
> require more than a push of a button.

I don't think that that would work with real programs. You'd still need at
least string freezes for translators.

Not necessarily, more on that further down in my reply.

Basically, the primary reason to write free software should be the fun the
programmers have. If it takes a little longer to release doesn't really
matter. Sure, it shouldn't take forever, after all you want some feedback
before forgetting that fancy new feature you wrote. But complicating matters
so much that it's just another day job and no longer the fun hobby is surely a
bad idea and going to drive away contributors.

Tobias

I totally agree it must be fun and rewarding, either you see that your contributions help other people or you learn something yourself on the way (or both). The rewarding part must be big enough to overcome the obstacles.

Back to the "string freeze" problem. Let's view it from the translators point of view. If I as a translator, translate 100 strings to Swedish and within 1 hour all Inkscape users that use Inkscape in Swedish will get a notification that new translations are available and in a push of a button can download them. Translations are decoupled from the application. This is just one way to solve it and the trade off is that with a new release some new features are only available in English but within a few hours/days/weeks it will be available in more languages. If nothing else this would be really rewarding for translators to see their work in the hands of users within an hour.

As I like automation I tend to go a step further than most others when it comes to these things (CI and testing) so it is good to have this discussion before any implementation is worked on so solutions I see are not obstacles for others.

Best regards

Christoffer Holmstedt