[Localization] [Sugar-devel] Should we branch off sucrose-0.94 next Monday?

[Chris Leonard]

On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 2:42 AM, Simon Schampijer <simon at schampijer.de> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> we discussed during the Sugar camp that branching off not too late during
> the cycle would benefit the future development, that we keep master open for
> development and stabilize the stable branch (e.g. sucrose-0.94).
>
> There is one downside about this. The localization team needs to translate
> two branches.
>
> a) are translators ok to branch off next Monday (hard code freeze starts)
> for sucrose-0.94 [1]
>
> b) what would be a good moment in the cycle to branch off in general to give
> localizers a good way of keeping up? After the feature freeze, after the UI
> freeze...after the hard code freeze... Or does it just come down to announce
> whenever new branches exists?
>
> Regards,
>   Simon


Handled properly, branching is not a significant issue for localizers
as all completed strings are migrated to the new branch and the rate
of divergence is usually not great.  The exact timing should not be
dictated by L10n but by what makes sense for developers.

It should be noted that i will definitely need Rafael Ortiz to make
the branching happen.  My backend Poolte-fu is not sufficiently
advanced at this point to accomplish this by myself.  Unfortunately,
in the past we have failed to branch properly, but this was handled
better in the transition to Sugar 0.92, so I am hopeful that we can
maintain that success in freezing a glucose 0.94 branch.

Localizers can focus on the frozen glucose 0.94 during the string
freeze and catch up with the new Glucose development branch after
release, but I suspect that it will be easy enough to keep up with
both at once if there is a high level of completion.

If there is not a high level of completion, it hardly matters as the
L10n of the earlierr branch would not be complete enough to usable in
practice.  In that case,  I would suggest that localizers focus on the
new Glucose development branch at first and the "backporting" of
identical strings to older branches can be done simply enough in
several ways (upload/merge with template refresh or copy/paste
transfer between two open windows).

I have often followed up when I see fresh activity on a newer branch
by a localizer by handing the transfer of identical strings myself to
keep the localizer focused on new strings and not administrivia like
backporting them to an older branch.  If you trust that the localizer
has translated the string properly in the main branch, you do not
really need to comprehend the language to simply transfer that text to
the earlier identical entries in previous branches.

Backporting strings is important as OLPC builds are typically using
stable (earlier) branches, but as a practical matter it is relatively
simple to accomplish.

cjl