Hello! As you may have noticed, our project has been almost sleeping for about a full year. Although nothing seemed to happen, translators continued to join our project on Transifex, especially Amedeo and his teams in Thailand and Vietnam, and we attended several free software events in western Europe. So this was apparent sleep only! That said I must confess that development didn't progress at all and restarted recently only, to support the new Thai version of DoudouLinux. NB: If you are a developer and find DoudouLinux doesn't progress fast enough, you know what to do, don't you? ;)
So what's up now? Because there hadn't been any language update for a while, we need to first publish a release 2.2 that will provide fresher translations. If you've followed the recent messages on our lists a bit, you know that we are working on the Thai version. This work shows things are not perfect concerning localization, so I need to fix and develop code to make it better. I'd also like to include new features to help translators get their work back to DoudouLinux more quickly, while still being working on Transifex. There are two options with pros and cons: 1. Include in DoudouLinux a tool that would update translations directly from Transifex. This would allow translators to see their work live, nearly at the time they translate! However this requires some coding and probably lots of tests. Ideally, translators would translate from within DoudouLinux, through the web browser. Unfortunately the web browser, Epiphany, doesn't display HTTPS sites anymore in DoudouLinux (Transifex uses HTTPS) and I fear this is due to the SSL issues recently discovered (which could mean we need to upgrade to Debian Wheezy). 2. Build language updates automatically from Transifex, on a nightly base, that will appear as standard system updates (apt-get upgrade). This is the path I'm taking. Basically, I try to automate everything I can to handle translations and localization, to avoid human mistakes and lower the effort (we have more than 45 languages…). Our Debian packages of translation updates are already built by few scripts without human action. Similarly, translations are fetched from Transifex by a single script. So I've started to setup a server that would do all these tasks automatically every night, and would publish updated packages as soon as a character has been changed on Transifex! Note that 2) doesn't exclude 1), I'd like to have both indeed, in a not so far future! If we want to be able to publish version 2.2 in quite short a time, I think no additional feature should be included. You may also know that Hyperborea 2.x is still based on Debian Squeeze, the old stable. So no need to spend too much time on it, it is better to focus then on moving to Wheezy and Jessie and give up Squeeze as soon as possible. I'm currently planning to publish version 2.2 by June, which means translations will be gathered for the official release by end of May or beginning of June. Of course, if all the translations are not OK for your language at this time, no problem, you'll be able to provide updates later using nightly translation updates (have you read the beginning of the message???). Concerning releases after 2.2, the plans are still to move to Wheezy first, in a release that would be numbered 2.5. This release will not provide anything more than 2.2, this will be a technical upgrade, so its number 2.5. Of course, as applications will probably be upgraded from Squeeze to Wheezy, translations may not be as good as they will be for 2.2 (but you know, nightly updates :), and some settings may not work anymore. The major difficulty with Wheezy is the absence of GDM2 on which the main DoudouLinux menu is based :(. I had started to work on that topic a year ago with Delphine, one of our graphic designers. We need to revive this work and make it work! Once 2.5 is published, say after summer, we would immediately focus on Jessie. Yes, the goal will not be to make a "perfect" release based on Wheezy, since it's going to become old stable quite soon. Hoping Jessie won't break too much things in DoudouLinux, we would move to Jessie by end 2015 or early 2016. The version number will be 3.0 and will hopefully bring new features, new applications and new graphic design. If you find this is too late, hem, you know what? Can also help the project progress faster, you'll be welcome :). That's it! Any comment, suggestion, disappointment, relief, worry, etc., feel free to share! Cheers, JM. _______________________________________________ Doudoulinux-lang mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/doudoulinux-lang
