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

[Sam Ottenhoff]

> 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.



>
> 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
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