Personally I'm unable to throw my vote towards any particular method
at this time but feel we're getting somewhere and that this topic
won't be forgotten. Ideally even more people will weigh in with
ideas, especially translators, for how best to approach this. There
are several good ideas floating around so to summarize them
(including my thoughts):
---
(A) The proposal with manually updated revision numbers. One for
minor, another for major. (Hannes)
I don't see forgetfulness (which would no doubt happen from time to
time) as a solid enough reason to scrap this idea entirely because we
have a strong enough peer review to combat that. Overall it's a nice
proposal but see below.
(B) Automatic revision increments by default, with ability to
manually disable the increment per commit. (Leonardo)
This is my current favourite (but how best to implement?) as it's
essentially the best of both worlds.
(C) Use the CVS commit message to designate status, and use scripts/
tools to parse. (Jakub)
A similar idea here is we could (in addition to B above) do this to
mark 'critical' commits in the message, and then a tool would let
translators know which files still require these critical fixes. In
fact, we may even consider 'hiding' these pages (via the build) by
showing EN/ versions until they are in fact translated.
(D) Have it all automatic, as done currently. (Nuno)
Hopefully the above thoughts help ease these concerns.
(E) ? (?)
---
And even though it's a good start, what we decide here won't be the
magical bullet that'll solve our translation problems. I can't speak
from experience but strongly urge all translators to think about this
entire topic and brainstorm for methods to help better manage the
translations. Is it simply a lack of volunteer time? Or is the
difficulty of working with the manual sources the main problem? Do we
need better tools? Is file ownership ever an issue? How does Japanese
bionic man Masahiro do it all? And while we're at it, let's ensure
the following is correct and wise:
http://doc.php.net/php/dochowto/chapter-translation.php
And regardless of what we do here, the idea of declaring outdated
translated text as outdated (and linking to en/) via the build system
will be done. Livedocs did it, and PhD will too. Right Hannes? ;-)
Regards,
Philip
