Re: RFA: start of i18n

["Eli Zaretskii" <eliz at is dot elta dot co dot il>]

> Date: Sat, 22 Jun 2002 11:51:03 -0400
> From: Andrew Cagney <ac131313@cygnus.com>
> > 
> > Speaking as a translator, freezing the strings before the release is a
> > good practice.  It would be nice if GDB followed it.
> 
> How much before?  1 week, 1 month, ...

A couple of weeks at least.  It depends on the number of messages to
translate, but I expect GDB to have a lot of them.

> 	-	branch gdb
> 	-	week later, freeze strings
> 
> that leaves ~4-6 weeks.

That might not be a good idea, since freezing strings only a week
after the branch is too early; chances are later changes will have to
modify the messages to some extent.

It's better to leave 2 weeks extra between the day you are confident
a release is ready and the actual release.  Then just resync with the
Translation Project database before you tar the release.

> By ``string freeze'' does that mean no new strings or, for late breaking 
> strings, not internationalizing them (omit the _(".."))?

Yes, it means that translatable strings will not be added or modified
after the string freze.

> Do the translators prefer to keep the trunk up-to-date or do they wait 
> for the release cycle?

They wait for a new version of the catalog (po/gdb.pot) file to be
submitted to the Translation Project Robot.  Then they update their
translations and submit them to the Robot.

> I've no idea what sort of process the translators follow or prefer here.

See

  http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/contrib/po/HTML/

It's all there.