L10N migration to transifex.net

[Jared K. Smith]

On Sun, Feb 20, 2011 at 10:33 PM, Ruediger Landmann
<r.landmann at redhat.com> wrote:
> This decision has greatly saddened and disappointed me. With all respect
> to Dmitris and his team, to me, it seems like Fedora is giving up a key
> part of our infrastructure and our independence.

Sorry for the slow response -- I wasn't keeping up with email for much
of the weekend, and didn't see this thread until this morning.  I
understand your point here regarding our independence, but I don't see
any vendor lock-in here.  The software is the same open-source
software we'd be running on our intrastructure -- it's just that
Indifex has offered to take care of the hosting/upgrades/maintenance
of it for us.  Because it's open source and we have the ability to
host it ourselves at any time, it really comes down to a matter of
trust.  Personally, I can say that I unequivocally trust Dimitris,
because I've seen the work he's done in Fedora both as a contributor
and a former member of the Fedora Board.

> Therefore, I have obtained permission from my manager to put time and
> resources into packaging Transifex 1.1 for fedoraproject.org. I have
> also had the time and skills of two Red Hat sysadmins allocated to get
> Fedora's own instance of Transifex upgraded and migrated ASAP.

That's fine, but you need to coordinate that with both the
Infrastructure team and the rest of the L10N team.  Having spoken to
the Infrastructure team about this several times over the past few
days, I know their first concern is going to be the dedication of
these resources.  In other words, they're not just looking for someone
who can upgrade us to 1.0 (or 1.1-dev) now, but *guaranteed resources*
to keep it upgraded and maintained and bugs fixed over the *long
haul*.


> I believe that if the Fedora Localization Project is open to the idea,
> we could have an up-to-date and fully functional local instance of
> Transifex 1.1 available within a week.

With all respect Rudi, it's not just about the Localization team... We
had meetings last week between the L10N team, the Infrastructure team,
the Docs team, FESCo, the Fedora Program Manager, and myself.  We
weighed all the pros and cons of the move, and we decided as a group
to move forward with the migration to transifex.net.  We migrated the
translations to transifex.net last Friday.  We've got a deadline of
having the transifex client packaged up and ready to go for package
maintainers by this coming Friday.  Any delay (or switch to another
platform) adds additional burden to our L10N team, especially when
we're already past the string freeze and into their translation time.

> I also want to take this opportunity to thank Dmitris for his extremely
> generous offer to host this massive project on behalf of Fedora.
> However, apart from the reasons I gave earlier, I also can't help but
> feel that this direction would be grossly unfair on Dmitris and his
> business. Indifex is, after all, a commercial venture, and server
> resources and bandwidth aren't free of charge -- especially on the scale
> contemplated for Fedora. Just before I came to work for Red Hat, I owned
> a small IT business myself, and know that every penny counts! :)

I don't think Dimitris would have made us the offer to host our
translations if he would have thought that it would be unfair to
Indifex.  I agree that Indifex is a commercial venture and that the
work they're offering does cost them money, but if Dimitris and
company are OK with that, how can I argue against it?  On the
maintenance/upgrades side of things, that's work they already have to
do for their other clients.  On the bandwidth side of things, I'm sure
they'll yell if their bandwidth costs get too high, and then we'll
make a determination on whether to compensate them for bandwidth, move
to being self-hosted again, or find some other solution.

May I also suggest that we move this discussion to the logistics
mailing list, since the discussion needs to include more people than
just the Docs or the Translation teams?

--
Jared Smith
Fedora Project LEader