Inactive translations

[Jonas Hahnfeld]

Hi all,

before making large changes to our documentation build (see other
email), I'd like to start a discussion on inactive / unmaintained
translations. For an objective metric, I looked at the date of the last
translation update, ie commits that only touched the respective
subdirectory in Documentation/. I came up with: (there may be better
ways to do this, possibly even in one git invocation)
 $ git log --format=%H -- Documentation/$lang/ > Documentation.$lang.commits
 $ git log --format=%H -- Documentation/ :^Documentation/$lang/ > 
Documentation.non-$lang.commits
 $ cat Documentation.$lang.commits | grep -v -f Documentation.non-$lang.commits 
| git log --no-walk --stdin

Based on this, I would group our 11 translations into the following
categories:
 * very active: fr, it (web needs some updates for recent changes)
 * maintained: ja (mostly, web needs some updates for recent changes),
de (I try to maintain at least web; other documents are in a worse
state)
 * reasonable: es (until 2020), ca (translation of Usage manual in
2022, last change before that in 2019), zh (updates in 2021; still
quite a bit of English text in there?)
 * endangered: hu (translation of Essay in 2021; last fixes before that
in 2017; last real changes in 2016?); pt (added in 2018, translation
fixes in 2019, technical fixes in 2020)
 * outdated: cs (last update by Pavel in 2012; some passages copied
from German manual!), nl (last update by Jan in 2012)

Especially the last category is bad and I would like to propose that we
delete these translations; I think it is better to have the community
use the English version instead of a translation from more than 10
years ago. If somebody wants to update them, I guess they are better
off starting from scratch based on the English version anyway.

For Hungarian and Portuguese, I'm not so sure: On the one hand, they
have seen "recent" updates, but the most important "document", that is
web being served on lilypond.org, is heavily outdated. Overall, I
personally think it would also be better to remove them. If somebody
wants to update and maintain them, it would be easy to bring them back
from git history.

What do you think?

Jonas

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