gettext: Information Flow

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1 12.5 Information Flow
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1    * NOTE: * This documentation section is outdated and needs to be
1 revised.
1 
1    There will surely be some discussion about this messages after the
1 packages are finally released.  If people now send you some proposals
1 for better messages, how do you proceed?  Jim, please note that right
1 now, as I put forward nearly a dozen of localizable programs, I receive
1 both the translations and the coordination concerns about them.
1 
1    If I put one of my things to pretest, Ulrich receives the
1 announcement and passes it on to the German team, who make last minute
1 revisions.  Then he submits the translation files to me _as the
1 maintainer_.  For free packages I do not maintain, I would not even hear
1 about it.  This scheme could be made to work for the whole Translation
1 Project, I think.  For security reasons, maybe Ulrich (national
1 coordinators, in fact) should update central registry kept at the
1 Translation Project (Jim, me, or Len’s recruits) once in a while.
1 
1    In December/January, I was aggressively ready to internationalize all
1 of GNU, giving myself the duty of one small GNU package per week or so,
1 taking many weeks or months for bigger packages.  But it does not work
1 this way.  I first did all the things I’m responsible for.  I’ve nothing
1 against some missionary work on other maintainers, but I’m also losing a
1 lot of energy over it—same debates over again.
1 
1    And when the first localized packages are released we’ll get a lot of
1 responses about ugly translations :-).  Surely, and we need to have
1 beforehand a fairly good idea about how to handle the information flow
1 between the national teams and the package maintainers.
1 
1    Please start saving somewhere a quick history of each PO file.  I
1 know for sure that the file format will change, allowing for comments.
1 It would be nice that each file has a kind of log, and references for
1 those who want to submit comments or gripes, or otherwise contribute.  I
1 sent a proposal for a fast and flexible format, but it is not receiving
1 acceptance yet by the GNU deciders.  I’ll tell you when I have more
1 information about this.
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