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List:       kde-core-devel
Subject:    Re: Documentation Disasters
From:       Lauri Watts <lauri () kde ! org>
Date:       2002-03-02 21:21:09
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On Friday 01 March 2002 18.01, Dirk Mueller wrote:
> On Fre, 01 Mär 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. 
> > 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 
education first.

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

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

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

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

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

Regards,
-- 
Lauri Watts
KDE Documentation Coordinator


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