Re: Unhappy about tools and update policy

On Fri, May 27, 2011 at 3:10 PM, Pjotr <pliniusminor@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I'm very unhappy about the tools and update policy concerning
> translations of Abiword.
>
> First the tools. I feel that, as a translation volunteer, I *really*
> should have better tools to do the job. Meaning fine tools like
> Transifex or Pootle, which are quite common in open source
> translations.

I have offered a possible solution to the tools issue by hosting
AbiWord PO files on the Sugar Labs / OLPC / eToys Pootle server. All
I need to hear to commit to the effort to do that is some voices of
interest from the AbiWord dev and L10n community. Your voice makes
one so far. I hope you can understand that I'm relucant to commit to
that effort if it will not gain acceptance among the AbiWord
community, so I am looking for some further encouragement. The GNASH
team was very positive and we are hosting their PO files now.

Hosting a Pootle instance is no small task, so I can understand why
the AbiWord team might not want to take on that administrative burden.
 AbiWord is an important upstream project to Sugar Labs / OLPC which
is why I have made the offer to share our existing instance for the
convenience of AbiWord localizers. For off-line localization, I would
encourage any localizer to try the excellent Virtaal tool from the
team that produced Pootle.

> Then the update policy. I disagree with the current policy, which is
> that only translations of the development version are being uploaded.
> Meaning: no uploads for the stable version. This may cause an
> unnecessary delay for the appearance of new translations in Linux
> distributions.

I can only agree with you on this. OLPC is making a
deployment-oriented release of a dual-boot Sugar/GNOME image soon (the
11.2.0 release) and AbiWord is included on the GNOME boot side, so
having updated L10n of 2.8 stable is important to our installed base
of over 1 million XO laptop users. I guess it is just a matter of bad
timing with 2.8 being EOL, but for a million users, perhaps AbiWord
would reconsider.

> Right now, I feel lack of motivation to continue with translating
> Abiword. I'm considering shifting my time and effort to other open
> source translation projects, that suit my expectations better. But I
> hope it won't come to that.

I hope it will not come to that either. Besides it's homeland, Dutch
is an important bridging language to Papiamento (from the Netherlands
Antilles) and as you've noted, it may be use to Afrikaans localizers
as well.

cjl
Received on Sat May 28 03:44:09 2011