Release criteria proposal: i18n criteria

Adam Williamson awilliam at redhat.com
Mon Oct 24 16:37:52 UTC 2011


On Mon, 2011-10-24 at 08:41 -0400, Kamil Paral wrote:

> > "All critical path actions on release-blocking desktop environments
> > should correctly display all sufficiently complete translations
> > available for use"
> 
> As usual I'm providing feedback only after it has been agreed on.
> Sorry for that. But I have worked in l10n area for quite some time and
> would like to add my thoughts. It seems to me that we implemented this
> criterion somehow backwards.
> 
> 1. This is not an i18n criterion, this is an l10n criterion. i18n =
> making the software translatable. l10n = translating the software.

No it isn't. It's specifically designed to *not* be an l10n criterion.
That's why it says that all sufficiently complete translations which are
available should be displayed: the code should not break display of the
translations. It does not make any requirement at all for any
translations to be available. If there wasn't a single word of Fedora
translated to anything but English, the criterion would not be broken.

> d) How do we distinguish an "important language"? It's really tricky.
> The most common language in the world is Mandarin [2]. Is it an
> important language? What about Hindi-Urdu, Arabic, Russian or
> Japanese? All of those have most speakers than let's say German. But
> do we have more German users or Arabic users? We have no idea. This is
> gonna bite us every time.

> 5. It might be due to my language handicap, but I don't understand the
> wording of the current criterion. "correctly display all sufficiently
> complete translations available for use" could be:

> a) that national characters don't get screwed up (i.e. white boxes instead of ěščřž)

Yes.

> b) that all translations available in the PO/MO file should also appear in the application

Yesish.

> c) that there must be no missing translations (this is the original
> purpose of the criterion, but I wouldn't have guessed it without
> reading bug 706756).

No, and no, this is not the purpose of the criterion. It's not about
missing translations. It seems like you only read the title of the bug,
not the text. As described at the time we wrote the criterion, it
appeared that translated text was available, but gdm was for some reason
showing the English text, not the translated text.

(Now, it seems like some kind of pilot error in the locale selection,
but that's not important to the criterion).
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net



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