Re: Regarding LSR translation work

[Graham Percival]

On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 12:04:57AM +0200, Federico Bruni wrote:
> Il 21/04/2012 13:09, Graham Percival ha scritto:
> >Because snippets come from LSR, and that needs a texidoc to
> >display some text for the snippet.
> 
> So it seems that there are only two possible solutions (I'm just
> daydreaming):
> 
> 1) manage all the docs snippets in Git and say hello to LSR (see
> bottom of my email)

Do you mean "goodbye" instead of "hello" ?

> 2) ask the LSR author to add the possibility to insert translated
> titles and descriptions (the website itself could benefit from this,
> since it may enable language negotiation). But managing the updates
> may be a problem..

You'd be asking him to do about 30 hours of unpaid work.

> >I really don't see any way to rescue the snippet system.  It was a
> >gamble that hasn't paid off; it was supposed to be a standalone
> 
> Since the gamble hasn't paid off (i.e. it didn't encourage
> *potential contributors*), why keeping this structure that is really
> annoying current translators (i.e. *real contributors*)?

Because any change involves work.

> Personally, I'm a bit worried about going on with translating NR
> when I know that keeping it up-to-date will be an hassle.
> 
> Let's manage all the doc snippets in Git and say hello to LSR import!
> Which are the arguments against this change?

It involves work.  In particular, horrible build system work,
which always takes an order of magnitude longer than you might
expect.

Any non-trivial change to the current system will take a minimum
of 10 hours of work, and I would not be the slightest bit
surprised if it ends up taking 50 hours.  Are *you* offering to do
all that work?  To spend 50 hours, and at the end of all that
work, have the documentation look exactly the same as it does
right now?

I don't see this as a wise investment right now.  We have much
more urgent problems to tackle.  And even if we didn't, I think we
could get better "bang for our buck" by putting that amount of
energy a different direction.  Organizing ly/, organizing the
regtests, make Patchy handle automatic countdowns, maybe start
GLISS...?  there's a *ton* of great projects which would be less
work and would produce better rewards.

- Graham