lör 2005-06-04 klockan 16:22 -0700 skrev Bryce Harrington:
On Sun, Jun 05, 2005 at 12:38:50AM +0200, Christian Rose wrote:
I'd like to ask a question (or rather two):
- Are there any plans on using GNOME CVS and GNOME Bugzilla
for Inkscape development?
We've been using SourceForge CVS since the project started. Sodipodi (Inkscape's predecessor) was in GNOME CVS. At the time, getting a CVS account for GNOME was a bit too manual of a process (requiring bugging GNOME administrators.) Those of us who had been Sodipodi developers had found that being allowed access to GNOME CVS was difficult and time consuming; IIRC it took several months for me to get GNOME CVS access.
I'm quite sure things have improved since then. Typically, the time span for getting an account nowadays is between a few hours and a couple of days at most.
Also, since Inkscape was born as a fork of Sodipodi, there was also some worry that GNOME would not allow us to use their CVS.
Oh, that shouldn't have been a worry at all. There are several projects in GNOME CVS that are essentially forks of other software in GNOME CVS. Epiphany is a good example; it started as a fork of Galeon. Both projects are still using GNOME CVS, and there was never any controversy over that. The only controversy was over which one of them should eventually go into the GNOME Core release, but that was a totally different matter.
The main downside we faced was that we'd lose the involvement of the GNOME translators, which we'd had very good experiences with in Sodipodi. A second downside is that SourceForge CVS has been problematic (and slow) compared with GNOME CVS.
However, despite being outside GNOME's translation community, we've nonetheless gained very good involvement from translators. Certainly not 115 languages, but then my guess is that many of those languages are not actively maintained anyway, and that Inkscape would not gain translations into more than a few new languages.
You're right, it's certainly not 115 very active teams, even though almost all of them are active to some degree. Anyway, when I browsed through the Inkscape po files I found that many of them essentially dated back to the Sodipodi days, so while Inkscape certainly hasn't a big shortage on translations, it seems the situation hasn't been as improving as it could have been doing during the time.
Translation looks to be pretty simple - for a given language there is just one file to update. Certainly that file is important, but important enough to warrant changing CVS? I guess I'm unclear on particularly why GNOME CVS makes translation so much easier?
I guess I failed to communicate the most important issue here. That issue is:
* Since you're essentially doing your sort of own translation project with Inkscape, how do you solve issues of translation quality control and peer review?
In other words, what would stop someone else from submitting a poorer Swedish Inkscape translation and having it committed, just weeks after I sent in mine? Do you keep track of your translations and who translates into what language? Do you ask people to confirm that they are ok with translations? Do you ask multiple volunteers for any language to get in contact with each other and sort issues out themselves, or do you just hope that any latest translation sent in by anyone is the one to commit, and hope that any issues will be caught by end users after the next Inkscape release?
Even if you do try to take care of these issues by having some control over who translates into what language, it's often a delicate process, since oneself cannot be the judge of "which translation is better and is this person right in claiming there is a problem with this translation?". I certainly myself don't know all the languages of the world, and even if I would, I wouldn't know it as good as a person who has the language as his mother tongue and spends much of his time translating into that language.
That's why a proper translation team divides its translators into language teams, to make the translators in the team (hopefully) collaborate and do some peer review on each other. In practice, this usually works out very well for improving translation quality and keeping a high quality over time.
Most of this is described at http://developer.gnome.org/doc/tutorials/gnome-i18n/developer.html#use-a-tp , together with other good points.
Of course, to do this one needs to have a lot of translators that can be organized into groups, and that already have quite some experience in translating, and this essentially means using some existing translation project service. Reinventing the wheel is not good use of time, and neither is recruiting people and making them get together, when there are already projects that do that.
Since Inkscape has previous connections to GNOME (using some GNOME technologies, following the HIG, etc.) I thought that using the GNOME Translation Project would be the best choice. However, using the GNOME Translation Project requires that the software be in GNOME CVS. It's simply not feasible for us to educate hundreds of translators how to update a translation in a completely different CVS repository, make them have access to that different CVS, and adopt all our automatic tools (like the translation status pages at http://l10n-status.gnome.org/) to work with that different CVS as well. An important point of the GNOME Translation Project is that translators should easily be able translate many different pieces of software, and many of our translators also do. Also, many of the translators (at least one in each team, and many teams have many more than one) have CVS access themselves and are able to quickly commit their translations and translations for other members in their team, so the translations get really fast upstream.
And it only works because all translators work against the same CVS repository.
Granted, there are other translation projects as well. The Translation Project (http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/contrib/po/HTML/) is a translation project that serves as a translation service for many different software projects, and it doesn't rely on a central CVS repository or something like that. It's essentially a mail-based translation service, although it has all the benefits of language teams and so on behind the scenes.
Still, I think the GNOME Translation Project would be a better match, since Inkscape has connections to the rest of GNOME.
Now, we *have* seriously considered switching how we manage source code, but I think the general concensus is that we want to move *away* from CVS to something like Subversion, that would give us more powerful code management. Our hope is that SourceForge will eventually implement this, although since SF seems to be taking a long time to get this, I think we'd consider other Subversion providers.
GNOME is currently considering a switch to a replacement for CVS. It's being discussed on the gnome-hackers list (http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-hackers/). Subversion and Arch seems (according to my analysis of the threads) to be the main contenders, although Subversion seems to be the favorite since it has the benefit of being more close to how CVS works.
So you wouldn't actually be losing a chance to change SCM tool by migrating to cvs.gnome.org. In fact, the change on gnome.org might perhaps even happen before Sourceforge would do it. However, it's a community decision.
Anyway, you may be right that it would make things more convenient for the GNOME translators, and it's possible that would gain us more translations. On the other hand, it risks making it more difficult for new developers to get CVS accounts, would take a lot of effort to migrate,
As for making sure CVS repository files get imported and making sure accounts get arranged, I promise that I'll help out as much as I can.
If you don't trust my word for it, please ask other people who maintain software in cvs.gnome.org, and what their experiences are on getting CVS accounts arranged for the last year or so. :)
and it doesn't correspond with our ultimate goal to move to Subversion anyway... So it's not entirely clear to me if this is worth the effort of doing. It might help to have a better idea of specifically how many GNOME developers/translators would contribute significantly to Inkscape if it was in GNOME CVS. I assume most people that wish to contribute to Inkscape would be able to just upload patches or request a CVS account from us.
We've also considered alternate bug trackers, but most people are suitably comfortable with the SourceForge tracker so there's no plans to change. I'm not sure what Bugzilla would buy us, other than imposing a more confusing user interface on our poor users. ;-) If we did change we'd probably adopt Mantis rather than Bugzilla.
Oh. We've had many projects move to GNOME Bugzilla just because they utterly detest Sourceforge's bug tracker and its lack of more advanced features so much. This is the first time I hear that someone likes it as it is. :)
Anyway, yes, Bugzilla is more complex. On the other hand, the GNOME bugmasters are constantly working on improving Bugzilla, and part of that is making it easier to report bugs: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/simple-bug-guide.cgi
Hint: Try to report a bug in the translation of a piece of software, say the Swedish translation of gedit. The bug report will be automatically assigned to a translator in the affected GNOME Translation project language team, in this case Swedish, so that he or she is immediately notified about the problem. Neat, isn't it?
Thanks for your comments, Christian