Translate Beta Release Notes

[John J. McDonough]

On Wed, 2010-03-17 at 11:36 +1000, Noriko Mizumoto wrote:
> Hi
> 
> I have had the chat with Rudi regarding the subject, to get the info of 
> it's progress. It seems that the wiki version is not yet complete thus 
> there is nothing in XML, meaning POT&POs to be empty even they are made atm.
> 
> Now this turned into the question which requires the attention from all 
> of us.
> It is said from docs team that 'we never translate beta rel-note, and 
> this item should not have been on the L10N schedule. This did not happen 
> for F12 actually'.
> Besides this item can be found in the schedule of F9 through F13.
> 
> Do we need this entry or not?  If we need it why? If we don't need it 
> why? It would be needed to clarify the usefulness of this entry.
> How you think?
> 
> noriko

We keep changing what we are doing.  For Fedora 12, at least as far as
Docs was concerned, the schedule was quite far removed from reality. It
had us doing things out of order, so for the most part we relied only on
the release dates and ignored the schedule after the first time it
burned us. Our original intent for F12 was to have the release notes
largely complete in English by beta, and have the translation proceed to
GA with relatively few changes.

That didn't happen.  A lot changed, and to try to manage the changes we
had branch after branch so that l10n didn't have a constantly changing
base.  The problem with that was that throughout the process we would
have plenty of strings needing to be translated, but l10n couldn't have
them.  As we discussed during setting up the F13 schedule, this really
wasn't very productive.

So for F13, we were planning to keep the POTs up to date with the XML,
so l10n always has whatever can be translated, and thus has the maximum
amount of time to do their job.

To make that a little easier, from beta through release, we were going
to post the partially translated work every night so translators could
see their result.

I have to admit I was a bit surprised to see the item on POs being
complete on the 22nd, especially since if we weren't behind, which we
are, that would give l10n three working days to translate the release
notes, which doesn't seem at all reasonable.

I have to wonder whether we were thinking of alpha release notes, which
are a single page, when we made that entry, or if it somehow got added
after our meeting with John.  I have to admit I haven't tried to match
John's final schedule to my original to see if there were any late
changes that didn't make sense.  I just assumed it would be essentially
as we left it.

--McD