Bubulle's weblog

The string freeze of Debian Installer officially ended at 23:59 yesterday (Sept. 20th). Indeed, this was extended a bit to today, with agreement by Otavio Salvador who I thank for this.

That allowed Zak to "save" Tagalog and also the Welsh and Latvian translators to polish their work.

We now have to decide about some of these languages: those that failed to meet the release criteria but were formerly activated in D-I. There are four such languages: Amharic, Welsh, Estonian and Northern Sami.

Please find below the mail I just sent to debian-i18n and debian-boot. I promised that this discussion would happen in public. It will (but it will be short as we can't delay the release of the installer for ages....and I think that my proposals are reasonable!)

First of all, the numbers as of Sunday Sept. 21st 09:32 UTC (date of
the last commit with an l10n update):

Languages meeting the release criteria: 59
------------------------------------------

Already activated and complete for level 1: 51
 Arabic, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Bosnian, Catalan, Czech, Danish,
 German, Dzongkha, Greek, Esperanto, Spanish, Basque, Finnish, French,
 Galician, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Croatian, Hungarian, Indonesian,
 Italian, Japanese, Georgian, Khmer, Korean, Lithuanian, Latvian,
 Macedonian, Malayalam, Marathi, Norwegian Bokmål, Nepali, Dutch,
 Norwegian Nynorsk, Punjabi, Polish, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese,
 Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Albabian, Swedish, Tamil, Thai, Turkish,
 Vietnamese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese

Already activated and complete for sublevels 1 and 2: 6
Bengali, Kurdish, Slovenian, Tagalog, Ukrainian, Wolof

Not yet activated languages complete for sublevels 1 and 2: 2
 (the mail in -i18n and -boot says 3 but this is an error by me)
Irish, Serbian

Languages failing to meet the release criteria: 15
--------------------------------------------------

Activated languages: 4
Amharic, Welsh, Estonian, Northern Sami


Not yet activated languages: 11
Afrikaans, Persian, Armenian, Icelandic, Kazakh, Kannada,
Malagasy, Malay, Telugu, Urdu, Xhosa


Discussion
----------

(careful people will notice that I moved Welsh down to "failed to meet
the release criteria" as this is what is technically correct)


Nothing to discuss for the 57 already activated languages that meet
the defined criteria. They'll be kept or first activated in the RC1
release of Debian Installer.

Similarly, nothing to discuss for the 11 languages that were not
activated and haven't made it. They will remain unactivated.

Two languages should be activated as they have met the release
criteria for the first time during the string freeze: Irish and Serbian.
This adds more load (and size changes) to D-I but I really don't see
any reason to not follow our own rules there.

The discussion comes for the 4 languages that fail to meet the release
criteria. Here are my proposals with some rationale:

Amharic: 
  I would really dislike deactivating Amharic because it's highly
  symbolic to have the language of Ethiopia activated. We have so few
  African languages. Also, the translation is nearly complete and the
  translator was well coping with updates until July. The missing
  stuff for Amharic in sublevels 1 and 2 are messages about loading
  drivers or firmware from removable media, the rescue mode stuff for
  the graphical installer and some messages that briefly appear during
  finish-install. A little bit more important is the message warning
  that the boot partition is not ext2 or ext3, added in August by
  tbm. I think this is not enough to drop out one year of efforts for
  the translator

  As a consequence, I propose to KEEP Amharic.

Welsh:
  Only five strings are missing in sublevels 1 and 2 because of the
  small experience of PO files by the person who completed the
  translation during last week. One will make the regular user login
  name screen to be in English and others will make the GRUB password
  screen to be in English as well, that's all.

  Additionnally, we can safely assume that all potential users of
  Welsh have good skills in English...and will therefore very easily
  cope with these screens.

  As a consequence, I propose to KEEP Welsh.

Estonian:
  The translation had NO update since Etch. The last update is dated
  back to Feb. 17th 2007. I haven't got any sign of life from the
  translator and no Estonian users have volunteered to maintain the
  translation.

  Missing strings are in many places, including several screens that
  appear in default installs. Even though one can assume that the
  skills of the average Linux user in Estonia is fairly good, I think
  this is not enough to throw users in a big mix of English and
  Estonian.

  As a consequence, I propose to DROP Estonian.

Northern Sami:
  The translation is very incomplete. With about any other language,
  that would be a reason to drop the translation.

  However, a few reasons make me suggest keeping it:
   - Northern Sami is mostly used in Norway and D-I will fall back
     to Norwegian Bokmål which is understood by all potentials users
     as it is teached in all Norwegian schools. 
   - Users will be warned, *in Sami*, about this situation
   - The choice of Sami will be kept in localechooser even if the
     translations are dropped. This is on request of Debian Edu
     developers to avoid them to develop a special boot floppy
     to offer the choice of Sami (a requirement for Norwegian
     schools). I personnally think this is a reward to Debian Edu and
     its ancestor Skolelinux for their initial involvement in the
     development of D-I

  As a consequence, I propose to KEEP Northern Sami.


I understand that these choices may be debatable and some may sound
slightly subjective. I however think this is the best way to be fair
with translators' efforts without compromising the quality of D-I.

Please note that the final word on this will be by D-I release
managers...but advices are very much welcomed.