Translate Beta Release Notes

[Paul W. Frields]

On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 11:56:33PM -0400, John J. McDonough wrote:
> 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.

I'm not sure why this seemed to sneak up -- during the last meeting I
calledout the fact that beat editing was supposed to end March 15, and
linked out to the schedule here:

http://poelstra.fedorapeople.org/schedules/f-13/f-13-docs-tasks.html

It says:

* Porting the wiki to Publican should be finished by March
  15th. (LATE)

* Between March 15th and 22nd, Docs is to make ongoing builds of HTML
  for translation review. (LATE)

* Beta release notes translations are to be finished by March
  22nd. (AT RISK)

* The release notes RPM is to be built by March 24th. (AT RISK)

* Final changes to the wiki beats are due by April 12th.

* Changes from the wiki should be ported to Publican by April 19th.

* Between April 19th and 26th, Docs is to make ongoing builds of HTML
  for translation review.

* Final release notes translations are to be finished by April 26th.

* The final release notes RPM is to be built by April 28th.

Is there anything about the project schedule that is presently
unclear?  If so, indicate specifically what it is and let's get it
resolved, preferably before tonight's Docs meeting.

* * *

I would suggest that we additionally do the following:

* Notify translators that we will continue to accept translations
  after March 22nd.  This is a "soft" deadline, because we can build
  additional release notes RPMs between March 24th and April 28th, and
  issue them as updates to the F13 Beta release.  This work will
  generally be in support of the final release notes.

* All Docs contributors working on the release notes should be careful
  to minimize string changes wherever possible between the content we
  freeze for Beta, and the content for Final.  This ensures that
  translators will not face overwhelming changes between the Beta
  release notes and the Final.  Adding or deleting full paragraphs (or
  other DocBook elements) of content is usually not as big a problem
  as making changes to existing content, in general.

* * *

Did anyone start moving the wiki content to Publican after Noriko
reminded the list about the March 15th deadline?  If not, that needs
to begin right away!

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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