[DG: Euro Sakai] [WG: I18N & L10N] Resource bottlenecks and the need to look for dedicated effort.

[Jean-Francois Leveque]

On 20/02/2013 00:40, Sam Ottenhoff wrote:
>
>     At the Paris Conference Jean-Francois and myself were tasked with
>     supporting the review of i18n  Jira patches that were long standing
>     and did not appear to be moving forward. Neal Caidin followed
>     through with looking at a number of example patches.  The conclusion
>     was that the patches were bottlenecked due to the lack of a
>     dedicated and trusted committer(s). Other slow moving patches
>     include feature requests that have the same cause.
>
>
>
> Is the committer the bottleneck, or is the review the bottleneck?  On a
> CLE Team call where we discussed a large amount of new translations
> contributed by Unicon, Jean-Francois mentioned that he wanted a reviewer
> for each language before a commit was made to trunk.  There were several
> people on that CLE Team call willing to commit, but clearly we don't
> have the review capabilities.

i18n and L10n are related but different. Let's not mix different issues.

The issue with L10n is long term support of translations for their own 
communities. Part of Unicon's contribution was merged without even a 
mention to the official maintainers of the locale.

If volunteers want to be trained on i18n reviewing, this could be done.

>     Murcia University have reviewed their local improvements. When they
>     migrate to the our best Sakai version ever (2.9.1) they will follow
>     community best practice and try to return the improvements all 22
>     patches back to trunk. I expect that a similar bottleneck condition
>     will ensue under the present conditions.
>
>
>
> I can promise that if they are added to our weekly CLE Team call, they
> will be reviewed.  We meet every week on Thursday at a European-friendly
> 15:00 GMT.  Our agenda URL follows this pattern:
>
> http://etherpad.ctools.org/rmmt-2013-02-21
>
> Steps that can be taken to increase the chances of a quick and helpful
> review:
>
> 1) Clean patches; no formatting changes, whitespace changes
> 2) Patches against latest trunk
> 3) Attend the CLE Team call to answer questions or explain the need
> 4) Answer questions presented in the JIRA (the quicker the responses,
> the better)
> 5) A clear explanation of the problem the patch is attempting to solve
> 6) Screenshots!
>
> The weekly phone call is attended by many core committers to Sakai who
> respond and followup to issues every week.  I assure any institution
> looking to get their patches into trunk that they will receive debate
> and feedback if they are added to our weekly agenda.
>
> --Sam