Re: unneeded translations?

Helge Kreutzmann <[email protected]> Sat, 15 Nov 2025 09:55:50 +0000
Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.internationalization.general,gmane.linux.debian.devel.www
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
Hello Thomas,
Am Sat, Nov 15, 2025 at 10:23:37AM +0100 schrieb Thomas Lange:
> >>>>> On Sat, 15 Nov 2025 08:32:04 +0000, Helge Kreutzmann <[email protected]> said:
> 
>     > I might be a good idea to ask those people who added them. As
> This will be a lot of work for me, that I will not do.

This begs the question what problem you are really solving.

Are the machines running out of disk space?

Are the machines getting to slow?

If content is outdated, it is not shown, fine. If later someone
updates it, it is shown again. So there is no hazzle for anyone
involved (besides the translators, of course). 

Translations are quite a bit of work. People doing the translations,
agreeing on good terms, running reviews in their language, performing
QA when needed etc. All these people sure must have some motivation.

And sorry, "too much effort" is IMHO not a good excuse. As these pages
are already identified, you, as a programmer, probably can come up
with a good short script, which for each page looks up the first commiter,
extracts their e-mail address and automatically sends an e-mail to
them.

> We cannot always ask people that created a page years ago (for e.g.
> webwml/german/international/Greek.wml is from 2001) if they still
> think this is needed.

Deleting other peoples hard work should at least trigger an automated
e-mail in case one of the problems outlined above occurs, giving them
a chance to handle this. 

> But I'm happy if you would do this for all german translations in
> international.

This would probably me. But I handed over the German translation
maintenance quite some time ago. My motivation was clear: I wanted to
have a good coverage over a large fraction of the web page.

But my motivation (besides time) to work on this again are low,
especially after last year (?) quite a bit of old translation was
deleted without looking for substitute, claiming that the original
content was still available in some mailing lists (where the
translation was not present, of course).

So maybe considering the translators[1] more would be a first good step.
And yes, I know many of them are overloaded, have too many projects to
support and make mistakes, ask questions or simply vanish. But for
Debian, I think this would be a valuable investment.

Greetings

          Helge

[1] And yes, as (upstream) maintainer of manpages-l10n I've seen this
    all.

-- 
      Dr. Helge Kreutzmann                     [email protected]
           Dipl.-Phys.                   http://www.helgefjell.de/debian.php
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