[Soc-coordination] Debian gsoc for i18n

[Christian PERRIER]

Quoting Stan Ioan-Eugen (stan.ieugen at gmail.com):
> Hello,
> 
> My name is Ioan Eugen STAN and I want to participate in Debian gsoc. I
> was involved in Squeeze (and Lenny) release notes localization for
> Romanian and translated some po-debconf's. During this time I got in
> touch with how things are going and I noticed that things need to be
> improved in i18n.


I have mixed feelings here (which indeed explain why I didn't followup
immediately).

At very first, I really welcome a GSOC proposal around i18n
infrastructure. Moreover, coming from someone who already has proven
his involvment, it makes me confident that it could succeed.

I'm however puzzled by the point about Pootle. We certainly need to
have a good online translation tool...but our main problem, as of now,
is to make it fit the way Debian packages are developed (highly
distributed...no central place where you can be sure that PO files
are).

This is more what limited the use of Pootle until now...much more than
the quality of the tool. Indeed, what we have on i18n.d.n is a too old
version of Pootle, not inline with recent development of the
framework.

Upgrading churro to squeeze would already bring it more inline and I
think we could end up with backporting the latest version and maintain
this.

So, assuming the Pootle is not suited is not necessarily the good
approach and I'm not sure that ${fancytool} is better suited..:-)

Still, I don't want to discourage you and it would probably not be a
great idea to rule your proposal out..just for this.

However, what you also need to find a a mentor... and, here is the
reason for which I didn't answer immediately: I can probably be seen
as "the mentor to have"...however, I'm not sure sure I could be able
to give the needed time and attention all over the GSOC months. My
involvment in Debian varies from month to month, depending on my
professionnal activities, which are more and more demanding. So,
really, I would be very  careful before replyign "yay, I can mentor
you"...and if anyone else feels like (s)he can do that, please feel
free to speak and don't assume that, because this is i18n, bubulle can
do everything..:-)




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