Re: [babel-dev] Does Eclipse Babel suffer from the "not invented here" s

["Claude Vedovini" <claude@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Bjorn, so then if you appreciate my company I feel can continue a
little bit further :)

Right now, for the Babel project you are going to need two different
communities to form, one of developers, for the platform and one of
translators for the actual work. One is going to wait for the other.
This seems counter productive to me.
I think the most important is the translators community, the sooner
you give them the tools they need, the sooner (and the better) the
project will get started.
Let's face it, there is not a lot of translators out there willing to
work for free. Being able to get some of those that work on projects
like Mozilla, OpenOffice, GNU/Linux, KDE, etc. and that are used to
tools like KBabel or Pootle to work as well on Eclipse should be one
of your main concern.

I don't want to go on a side by side comparison of features, (besides,
Pootle supports Java property files) but there is a lot of features
that really helps translators (including a revision workflow), and I
would be surprised that Eclipse be so special as to have requirements
so different than that of the above cited projects (not all GPL).
And even so, where I used to work, it would certainly be one of that
case where adopting something that already exists encompass the
missing, yagni, features.

Actually, if I was you I think I would even use the Decathlon project
(http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/decathlon/mainpage) to host
Babel (at least the translation part of it). I mean, if I was so much
concerned about the project not starting because of the lack of
community interest and staff resourcing I would try to provide a
maximum of features with the least of efforts.

If I was able to save some time from my work and family life I would
be happy to contribute more. I hope, I will, one day.

This time I am off :)
Regards,
Claude

PS: You should give a percentage of completion in the "Translation
progress" widget of the Babel home page instead of numbers (number of
what by the way?)

On Mon, Apr 21, 2008 at 9:24 PM, Bjorn Freeman-Benson
<bjorn.freeman-benson@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>  Claude,
>
>  To me you could just say "we use pootle to support translators" and
> that's it. Like someone said one day "we will use CVS to support
> developers". I don't see any difference.
>
>  The difference is that pootle doesn't support all the features that Eclipse
> translations need. Off the top of my head, it doesn't have: output to
> Eclipse/Java properties files not an audit trail/history of each string.
> Thus we would have to modify the pootle code in order to use it. We don't
> have to modify the CVS code at all in order to use CVS.
>  Therein lies the fundamental difference.
>
>  Now, we could modify the pootle code inside the Foundation and just use it
> on a server, like we do with some of our bugzilla instances. However, then
> we (the Foundation staff) would be stuck with supporting Babel/pootle
> forever and doing all the coding work. We (the Foundation staff) do not have
> the resources to do that - Babel must be a community effort with others
> contributing to the coding. Thus either (a) Babel has to be an Eclipse
> project = no GPL or (b) we just use a raw pootle install and everyone
> contibutes to pootle = Foundation staff cannot participate = project never
> gets started.
>
>  But coming back to the CVS example, the people who are administrating
> CVS in the Foundation did certainly contribute to it be it only by
> filling bug tickets or feature requests.
>
>  Yes, but according to our Board, filing bug tickets and contributing code
> are different activities. We can (and do) do the former against GPLed
> projects; we don't do the latter.
>
>  I would not want you to think I am a troll so I will stop bugging you
> further :)
>
>  Bug away - you haven't bothered me yet :-)
>  I appreciate your point of view, I really do, and if we had a different set
> of IP policies at the Eclipse Foundation, your suggestion is very
> reasonable. However, we have a certain set of IP policies that work well in
> most situations and our members are pleased with those policies, so we must
> follow them.
>
>  - Bjorn
>
> --
>  [end of message]
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