How to move ahead ?

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

Salam all - this is a VERY serious email (I'm rather sorry its come
to this in order to make any forward progress), but its getting critical
and we are on the edge of losing everything that we had accomplished
when it comes to translations/localization.

Here's the deal - looking over at linux4arab.com we can all see that
a big percentage of people (185/319 -- 57.81% as of today) noted
wanting to help arabize linux.  I have two very important questions,

 1. What can be done to get those people plugged into what we are
    doing here at arabeyes.org (and on the 'doc' list in particular
    since its rather non-technical work and might suite _most_ newbies) ?

 2. The KDE/Gnome projects with the exception of some commits from
    Mr. Nuriddin Aminagha has pretty much seen ___NO___ commits from
    anyone else recently.  Which leads to the crux of this email --

    a. We are looking for comments on what we can do to make things
       interesting and to keep the level of committals high and ongoing.
       We have been told that the work is rather 'boring' and seems
       to not progress to anything - and to that we don't have an
       answer -- in short, we know and we sympathize.  But unless
       we can openly talk about what can be done by all involved we
       are rather concerned that translation projects and thus Arabic
       localization will truly suffer.

       You all read today Isam's post - we very narrowly missed being
       excluded from KDE 3.1 (yes, that is they almost did NOT include
       Arabic) -- is this what we want ?  Are we all willing to live
       with seeing all languages included but not Arabic (again, be
       counted with the losers of this world) ?

       http://www.arabeyes.org/misc/kde_status_bar.html    (at 24%)
       http://www.arabeyes.org/misc/gnome_status_bar.html  (at 23%)

    b. The one positive suggestion we have had regarding this topic is
       that different people should be responsible for different sections
       of the KDE/Gnome translation trees.  In other words, person-A
       would be responsible for files 1 - 20 in some KDE dir, person-B
       would be responsible for files 20 - 40 in some other KDE dir and
       so on.  Would that help people ?  Do the past heroic translators
       see benefit in approaching things in this manner ?  Will this
       approach keep you around translating and helping ?  If not, what
       will ?

In short - we are _very_ concerned with the lack of progress and are
looking for dialog and want to hear what ideas you guys have.  Simply
put, we need progress and we need commitments and so all your ideas and
thoughts are welcome.

We would have hopped to have started on other localization projects by
now -- like assisting on mozilla, etc but we very much need to have this
dialog to know whether we have the right mindset to take-on more work.

Please tell all your friends/colleages/LUGs about our ongoing work -- we
want to reach those 185 people that voted :-)

Salam to all and I really want to hear from every single one of you !!

 - Nadim


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