Translation refresh

[Bernie Innocenti]

On Sun, 2008-04-20 at 17:54 -0400, Kim Quirk wrote:
> Bernie,
> I'd like to make two points regarding your notes:
> 
> 1 - OLPC cannot be responsible for activities. So it is really much
> better that the activities are now separate from the base code to help
> get this point across to the country. As a 'sales' type person, you
> need to convey that activities are built, tested, translated by the
> community. OLPC will not be qualifying or certifying them. The country
> needs to reserve time and resources in its own schedule to help ensure
> testing and translation of the activities that they want. And they can
> do this, because the activities are not tied to our release schedule.
> If we can separate translations in a similar fashion that seems like a
> good way to go.

I had not thought about it in this way, but it makes sense.
It is also close to what I've been saying to convey the idea
that we are a large international effort.

I often point out at the icons and say: "See?  These two come
from developers from India and Brazil, while these are from
a professor of Montreal."

A few dumb questions that I've been forgetting to ask for weeks:

 - Is there anyone who maintains the activity packs to keep
   them up to date for new deployments?

 - Which pack should be used for demos and new deployments?
   I've been using the G1G1 pack for a while.

 - Will there be an official mechanism to update activities
   alongside the OS in the future?  I've been using Bertf's
   update-activities.py, but it's of course for developers.

> 2 - Rolling a build takes a week, not 10 minutes. A build that is
> ready for release to the public, contains many steps: From check-ins,
> to packaging, to build creation, to testing, to the signing of the
> build, to getting a build properly into manufacturing... there are
> many steps and each step has many points of failure. Some of these we
> can eliminate over time through automation... but we aren't there yet.

Both me and you have been intermixing the terms "build" and "official
release" a bit too much.  While the former really takes 10 minutes on
my hardware, turning it into the latter requires all the additional
work that you say.

For small quantities such as in the Italian case, would it make
sense to have a semi-official release that does not get preloaded
in the factory, but is nevertheless signed by OLPC?

-- 
  \___/
  |___|  Bernie Innocenti - http://www.codewiz.org/
   \___\ CTO OLPC Europe  - http://www.laptop.org/