Re: Comments on Mathias blog post about contributing

Hi Mathias,

Mathias Bauer schrieb:
...
> 
> Currently the way how localizations get into OOo is very inefficient. At
> some point in time a "deadline" is reached and a whole bunch of
> localizable content is exported from the source tree and handed over.
> Localizers do their work, send it back and have to wait until Sun
> release engineering has collected it and provided a new build containing
> all the work. If bugs are found, the next round follows. I think we can
> do better.
> 
> My idea for a long term goal is that all localization related content
> (help, UI etc.) resides in an own Mercurial repository that localizers
> can check out and directly commit to (if they want). A *simple* build
> process (that does not require to check out the whole OOo source) allows
> them to test their results themselves and immediately correct errors,
> but that would be optional. Of course it should still be possible to
> work as today (send changes to Sun release engineering), comparable to
> the situation of code contributors that either can create an own CWS or
> send in patches.
> 
> In a system like this localization even does not need to have a
> deadline. Once a feature is done and documented, it can become
> localized. Whether we want to do that is open for discussion.

Even with the current L10N process this increased flexibility, that you 
seem to have in mind, can IMO be reached, since it would be possible to 
import the new and changed strings from every milestone into the Pootle 
system used for translation. But a little more automation should be done 
in order to reach this goal since doing these imports manually is quite 
time consuming. Then translators could continuously work on the translation.

Getting the translations back into the code still requires a CWS. This 
work is, at least at the moment, done by Ivo or Vladimir, and they do it 
for all languages, saving the L10N teams a lot of work IMO. Currently 
such an L10N CWS is created once per release, which means that 
translators get feedback on their work quite late. This frequency could 
be increased, and I know that Ivo has spent some work on automating the 
processes around creating an L10N CWS in order to create these CWS more 
often, but AFAIK there still remains some work to do.

So, while I think you did draw a valid picture of an L10N build process 
above, I think we could improve the situation with far less changes to 
the current processes and thus far less work. IMO we should try to 
implement the improvements I sketched out above first and then see if we 
have to go a step further and perhaps change the processes as you 
outlined above.

Regards,

Jörg