On Friday 01 March 2002 18.01, Dirk Mueller wrote:
> On Fre, 01 M=E4r 2002, Lauri Watts wrote:
> > We deeply appreciate when you write documentation, but it is less
> > appreciated when the result is hundreds of hours work by
> > potentially hundreds of other people is summarily thrown out.=20
> > Simply keeping us informed would avoid this.
>
> I'm very unhappy that this happens. Maybe we should add an ACL for
> the doc subdirs to avoid that people mess up the stuff..

I actually considered asking for this, but thought I'd try a little=20
education first.

Mostly the developers are accomodating about changing GUI messages=20
during the freezes, letting kde-i18n know, and I think it's just a=20
matter of getting the same cooperation with documentation.

Until we had an easy way to translate documents, with the xml2po system=20
coolo wrote us, this kind of thing didn't matter very much, because=20
there was no automation involved.  We had the system in place for=20
2.2.2, but it was very new, and there really wasn't very much=20
documentation translated with it by the time the release came around. =20

This 3.0 release is the first time it's got a real workout.  On the=20
bright side, KDE has more documentation translated into more languages=20
than it's ever had before, which is a major step forward.  It's also=20
shaking out the bugs in our workflow, and making it very clear that=20
more coordination is needed.

I think putting ACL's in place now would be more administrative work and=20
might alienate people.  Admittedly I don't know how much administrative=20
work it actually is, and if it can be handed off to us to manage, or if=20
it's something we'll be annoying the CVS admins with every five=20
minutes. =20

If we are still seeing the same problems by the time the next release=20
comes along though, it may end up necessary, just to keep our=20
translators (and me) sane. =20

Regards,
--=20
Lauri Watts
KDE Documentation Coordinator