Requesting a string freeze break of comps

[Christoph Wickert]

Am Donnerstag, den 16.10.2008, 02:27 +0300 schrieb Dimitris Glezos: 
> 2008/10/16 Christoph Wickert <christoph.wickert at googlemail.com>:
> > Hi everybody,
> >
> > I'd like to ask for a string freeze break of the comps file for F10,
> > because I want to add a new group for LXDE [1] called lxde-desktop. See
> > diff below for the proposed changes.
> >
> > Rationale:
> > People should be able to install LXDE with a single click/command.
> >
> > Impact:
> > Minor, only two stings all together: The first one can not be
> > translated, LXDE will always be LXDE. The second string is the
> > description, which is not even visible in package kit these days. So
> > localization of this string is not really necessary but only nice to
> > have for 'yum groupinfo'.
> >
> > Impact of not accepting the break:
> > If we don't add this group to comps the LDXE feature is definitely
> > washed-up for F10.
> 
> Looking at the comps translation statistics, more than 25 languages
> will drop to 99%. This will probably make equal number of people
> download the POs again, translate, and commit back.
> 
> Here's an idea. LXDE's description is quite similar to the XFCE one:
> 
> +    <_name>LXDE</_name>
>  +   <_description>Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment.</_description>
>     <_name>XFCE</_name>
>     <_description>A lightweight desktop environment that works well on
> low end machines.</_description>
> 
> How about using XFCE's description for this release to avoid breaking
> the freeze? 

To be honest I don't really like this idea but it's better then not
making the changes in at all. I guess that 99% of the users will not
notice it anyway.

> If you rebuild the PO files, the translation completeness
> shouldn't change.
> 
> In future releases, please make sure to keep in line with the
> deadlines and have all strings ready before the freeze.
> 
> If you have any comments on why this happened and how we can make sure
> it won't happen in the future, please comment in.

Sorry for that. I simply wasn't aware of the fact that my LXDE feature
was affected by the string freeze and none of the FeSCo members told me
so when they approved it. So for the future I propose that FeSCo informs
feature owners of potential pitfalls like these, but IMHO the
communication between FeSCo and feature owners needs to be improved in
general. See the "My feature was removed without notifying me" thread on
fedora-devel recently for more details and suggestions.

> If we need a
> different string freeze date or string freeze policy for comps, and I
> mean *really* need it, we could maybe discuss this idea for the next
> release.

I cannot comment on this suggestion because I'm not really familiar with
the translation process. Such a decision needs to be made by more
experienced translators.

Regards,
Christoph