* Martin Quinson ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: > On Sun, Aug 24, 2003 at 01:38:33PM -0400, Stephen Frost wrote: > > I'm not special caseing translations, nor do I feel they should be. I'm > > referring to NMU's in general. > > Maybe that's the point. Christian won't handle the same way non translation > bugs, because the changes implied are bigger and possibly more intrusive.
Translations should not be special cased. It's a new upload of the
package just like any other NMU.
> > This hasn't got anything to do with NMU's.
>
> With NMU in general, maybe not. But I see this as rather relevant to the
> kind of NMU we are talking about. If we add such tag, translators could
> follow the result of their work. Same thing for NMUer of translations.
As I said above, which you apparently missed, I'm referring to NMU's in
general.
> > > For NMU, I know that Christian tracks every NMUed packages until the next
> > > maintainer upload, to check that his changes are not broken or ignored. If
> >
> > Yet he admits that he can't actually maintan the packages he uploads via
> > an NMU. That's what I have a problem with.
>
> Well, he said that he cannot handle any kind of bugs rising in any kind of
> package. Yet, he can handle any kind of issue related to l10n and a bunch of
> i18n issues.
>
> > The RM is the one who said we should be "taking more care doing NMUs
> > than doing your own packages".
>
> And that's exactly what is done here. We are not speaking of automated mass
> NMU, but manual carfull and as rare as possible ones, with tracking the
> future of the package afterward. I understand your point about what could be
> an NMU fest, but this is not the case. The procedure *is* followed (beside
> the fact that they imply wishlist bugs).
I'm starting to tire of this. If you can't maintain the package you
shouldn't be NMU'ing it. It's really that simple.
> > I've pointed out numerous times in this thread already why it's wrong to
> > believe that you can NMU a package without having any responsibility to
> > it afterwards, except maybe for the bits you changed. Having that kind
> > of an attitude is detrimental to the distribution as a whole.
>
> Fully agreed. Who behave so badly ?
Just about everyone else appears to feel all they should care about is
the changes they make in their NMU instead of actually caring about the
package and the distribution. There's this feeling of "not my problem".
> > patch won't handle it properly? Attaching the patch to a mail message
> > instead of including it directly doesn't work? Funny, I recall applying
> > a patch for OpenLDAP using just such a mechanism without having a
> > problem.
>
> Well, either you were lucky, or you use good and well configurated mail
> tools. But if my language did need a funky encoding, I would not let my work
> depend of such conditions. Don't get me wrong. I mean that in such
> condition, uuencoding prevents the DD from shouting himself in the foot, and
> I've the feeling that it helps anyone, including the developer.
It'd just get in my way. You're making generalizations where I've
already pointed out you can't make them.
> > I'm tired of having to repeat for you what's been said in the thread.
> > Try reading it before you attempt to comment on it. Christian said:
> > ----
> > > The key point, as usual, is the "wishlist" status of translation bug
> > > reports. I, as a non native english speaker, do not consider
> > > translation to be only a "wish", but a requirement.
> > ----
> > I considered 'requirement' to be 'RC' level. He didn't disagree.
>
> I did read this mail. He did not agree either. Christian did say that he
> felt that discution leaded to nowhere because of radical opinion divergence,
> and that he prefered not to continue.
That was later, as I recall, though I'm too tired of this crap to bother
looking for it explicitly.
> So, once again, nobody here is threating to open RC bugs against all
> packages not translated in a given language. Nobody even spoke of opening
> bugs because a given program is not translated.
You, again, didn't read the thread. No one said anything about
threating to open RC bugs, etc, etc. There was, however, a discussion
about the possibility of changing the severity level at some point in
the future to where translations would be considered RC-level bugs. You
might read the thread to see our opinions on that.
> That would be stupid, and that will not be done.
>
> One of the reason is that RC means: "if this bug is not fixed, Debian should
> not distribute the package. At all." (bts-howto). Translation bugs are only
> sufficient to make the package useless for a subset of its potential users.
>
> But we do fill (wishlist) bugs when we did translate a part of the package,
> and then, when the translation rots in the BTS, we feel ok to NMU the
> package for that (as long as the procedure is respected).
Doing an NMU of a package you can't maintain is irresponsible.
> > You're implying that we cannot consider software 'free' unless it's
> > translated to every language. If you want to consider down this road
> > then consider that the majority of english speakers don't know C, or
> > C++, or any other programming language. Of course, the reality is that
> > the software being 'free' or not is a function of the license and not
> > what language it's written in, programming or otherwise.
>
> Not, I only mean that a whole amount of free software (as speach) aren't
> available to non english speaker. They are free, no doubt. But useless for
> 70-80% of the earth population. What a pitty.
> I don't want to do the revolution, but to find ways to get this fixed.
That's a fine goal.
> > My concern is with people not taking responsibility when they NMU.
>
> Christian does. The point is that we don't seem to be able to agree of what
> the responsabilities of NMUers are, You say that NMUing is like hijack for a
> limited amount of time, and we say that NMUing to fix a perticular point of
> the packaging not related with the program inside the package may be ok as
> long as the NMUer watch the package afterward to see if his changes trigger
> *related* issues or not.
No, we don't agree on the responsabilities of people who do NMUs. I
would have them be more responsible than you, thus giving packages which
have been let languish a chance to either be maintained or removed.
> > binary-only uploads are clearly not the same.
>
> Ah ? And why ? Translation changes do not interfer with the source code of
> the package neither.
There is a clear distinction between a source upload and a binary-only
upload. One changes the source, the other doesn't. Your claim that
translations don't change the source is false.
> Technically, it could be possible to use an overide system to put the result
> of the translator work into the binary package a few days after its upload
> by the maintainer (when the translator is done) without breaking anything.
> Naturally this would imply to bump the third (or a fourth) part in the
> package version number. But this has yet to be done.
I don't know that I would approve of such a method. I'd have to think
on it more. I don't consider it a part of this discussion, however.
> PS: I'm already subscribed to the list, thanks for the ccing.
Set MFT or whatever it is.
Stephen
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