[Freedombox-discuss] FreedomBox needs your help! The Debian Stable Freeze is coming up 22nd Jan, these are the last days to improve the first stable Freedombox release!

[freedombox at ikmaak.nl]

Hello fellow FreedomBox contributors and users,

The deadline (freeze) for packages in the next Debian Stable "Stretch"
will be up soon. After that time the state of FreedomBox at that release
will be what people will be using for the coming years.

There is no more time to add new features, but we could do another
version that includes all translations and manual improvements that we
can add in the coming days.

What is included on the 22th of January can still be packaged and
released, so that it is in in time before the hard freeze.

There is even a chance that there will be a feature release during that
time, that would add new strings that need to be translated even for the
languages that are currently up-to-date.

For now the online and the packaged manual is just in English, and
Plinth itself is fully translated into Chinese, Dutch, French, German,
Norwegian Bokmål, Russian, Spanish and Turkish.
Partial translations are available for Danish, Indonesian, Persian,
Polish, Swedish and Telugu, and a start in Portuguese.

So Freedombox is now available in 9 languages, and 6/7 partial
languages. It would be great if we could finish these translations in
time, or even add a few new ones! Go to
https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/freedombox/plinth/ to help out!

Also we could split off the documentation into a recent manual and a
"Stretch release" manual, because this release would diverge with the
upcoming improvements. Also maybe people would want to get together to
translate the manual, and we could link to those translations already,
and fix the translation in the wiki during the time between the freeze
and release. This would not have the manual included, but make starting
up a lot easier for new users once it is in stable.

The manual is available here: https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/Manual
and when the new package gets built it will also use improvements made
to that page. It is a manual page, it could always use some love! Added
illustrations or images showing usage scenario's are very welcome!

If people would express interest in making a translated version of the
manual, we could add links to and instructions for finding it, into this
release.

This is what creates the experience our user base will have in the
coming years, so anything you could do to help, would be appreciated.

As this will be our first entry into Debian stable, and this is a Debian
Pure distribution, this is a momentous stage in the history of
Freedombox (a real v1 in a way), and I would like to thank the
dedication of all the people that did all the work to get us here.
Freedombox will soon be stable, and its state then will be the base that
most users will see from us for a long time!

Greetings,

Ruben