Meeting tonight

[John J. McDonough]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Paul W. Frields" <stickster at gmail.com>
To: <fedora-docs-list at redhat.com>
Sent: Thursday, April 23, 2009 8:06 AM
Subject: Re: Meeting tonight

> What are some of the remaining questions?

I guess the biggie, IMO, is whether we are going to use ISO Language/Loc 
codes and how we are going to apply them.  The standard says you don't need 
the loc code unless it makes sense, but Publican seems to like it always. 
Also, ISO says hyphen between lang and loc, Publican uses a hyphen, most 
places in Fedora it is an underscore.

ISO codes work sometimes, but in preview, I made .omf's for both the ISO and 
the old code because I couldn't fathom the pattern as to why some things 
worked sometimes and not others, so I beat it with a club.  Once we get some 
breathing space I need to learn how the language gets from the button on the 
logon screen to yelp.  Perhaps then the behavior would make sense. 
Actually, I think Docs aren't the only thing broken.  For example, log on 
with Dutch and LANG gets set to en_US, and the screen that asks if you want 
to rename folders sometimes comes up in Dutch and sometimes in English.

The other thing is the omf's.  As far as I can tell, Publican provides no 
way to make them, and apart from a fully set up f-d-u, the only way I could 
come up with them was brute force. Again, once we get breathing space we 
need to come up with a strategy.

I didn't convert the 5 "minor" docs to Publican.  We should go ahead and do 
that since they now look a little like orphans.

I also wonder a little about the value of running Publican within rpmbuild. 
I guess I flip flop on that a little On the one hand, the real sources are 
in the rpm, and that is a good thing.  On the other, the rpmbuild takes a 
very long time, and the help xmls look awfully similar to the originals 
anyway.  I guess it does force a clean build, which is probably a very good 
thing.  Maybe the msgmerge should also be in rpmbuild.  It isn't right now.

> How would you quantify the remaining risk to the
> Fedora 11 final release?

I think the biggest question mark is how many translations get done.  There 
are a few minor updates that have been mentioned since we froze back on 4/1, 
but the main issue we dealt with for preview was simply getting the srpm 
onto Koji.  We need a few more packagers in Docs I guess.  But my Tuesday 
activities were pretty rote; update the dates in the readmes and run f-d-u, 
grab the latest translations and run msgmerge, then run rpmbuild.  Then run 
around finding someone to push it to Koji.  That was the hardest part and it 
shouldn't have been.  I guess the Publican part and msgmerge went smoothly 
partly because laubersm has been policing the translations very carefully. 
That risk completely got by me and if she hadn't been on top of it I may 
have had a much more difficult time.

--McD