Salam, I think I need to re-trace myself and remove all the passion out of my correspondences. Youcef is a member of the Arabeyes project, like many others, including myself. Arabeyes is involved in several projects, some of which are translations. We have evolved to have a certain model of doing this, which in my opinion, has been successful -- this is not to say that there isn't room for improvement (there's plenty of that). Youcef has started this project (local to Arabeyes) upon receiving what was understood to be maintainership of the Arabic language translations for Fedora. This has been a misunderstanding, as Arabic was never assigned a maintainer. However, we have continued to work under that wrong impression. So, we have our CVS, project page, mailing-lists as well as QAC to be followed by Fedora's Arabic translation (along with other translation projects). The beauty of this is that other translators can seamlessly translate for Fedora, KDE, GNOME, Mandrake, Debian, etc. since they are all on the same CVS. Most don't, but several translators enjoy being able to work on more than one project without having to deal with the many projects systems individually. In other words, Arabeyes simplifies this process by creating a single-point of contact. We then worry about the sync'ing with the other projects' CVS repositories. As I understand now, Fedora does accommodate to maintainers, but is still in its early stages of setting up for translations. In other words, some of the things that are wanted are still being worked on. I also understand that as long as there are no objections, Youcef can assume the role of maintainer. I also understand that there are in fact objections. It is unfortunate that these objections are not made public. The only person who has publically made an objection was Sherif. His concern was "issues with the translations" and "issues with the way Arabeyes handles things". In other words, there are still no publically cited concrete reasons to back these objections My question then is, what makes an objection justifiable for a rejection of an application to maintainership? Who are those other(s) people and what are there reasons? Are those reasons not work-able within the same framework that Youcef is implementing? The problem here is that if Youcef is not granted maintainership of the Arabic translation, it becomes impossible for Arabeyes to fit it under its current framework. In other words, this would in effect force Arabeyes to drop the project. This would mean that the 7 current translators for the project, excluding Youcef himself (let alone the others who overflow from other translation projects from time to time) will not be able to contribute to Fedora's translations. We will be forced to re-assign them to other projects. I apologize for the long emails, but I believe that explaining the background of Arabeyes's work methodology and Youcef's role in this can help others better understand why this is important. So, if Groh is the person who calls the shot on who is maintainer and who is not (I gather this from his offer to the Swedish maintainer), then I would ask him to consider all the above. Regards -- ------------------------------------------------------- | Mohammed Elzubeir | Visit us at: | | | http://www.arabeyes.org/ | | Arabeyes Project | Homepage: | | Unix the 'right' way | http://elzubeir.fakkir.net/ | -------------------------------------------------------
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