Translation Project Syncs (ATTENTION _ALL_ TRANSLATION PROJECT MAINTAINERS)

[Abdulaziz Al-Arfaj <aalarfaj at gmail dot com>]

Salam all,

As some of you might remember a while ago I requested that _ALL_
translation project maintainers try to sync their Arabeyes CVS
repositories with their respective project motherships at least once a
month, so that:
A. We know exactly how much we have achieved and how much we still
have without having to go directly to another project's website.
B. We do not get so far behind that we are deemed incompetent.

I walked through all of our currently active translation projects.
Here is what I found:

1. ACTIONAPPS:
I browsed the project's main CVS repository on SourceForge, I found
that the Arabic files are still not in the repository:
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/apc-aa/apc-aa/include/lang/
Raida, please send the POs we currently have to Honza and have him
send you the updated ones (I think the PHP files were updated two days
ago).

Speaking of which, some of the logs on the CVS mention that ActionApps
is planning to start using PO files as a standard instead of php files
(see: http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/apc-aa/apc-aa/misc/mgettext/).
This is something which I am strongly in favour of. Can you please ask
them and confirm this so we can start celebrating? :-)

2. DEBIAN:
Last sync was made 13 days ago. (Thank you Mr. Perrier!)
For almost 6 months now the Debian translation project has been seeing
very frequent and regular syncs very much like clockwork. That is why
it is [one of] our most successful projects. We should model all our
translation projects after this one.

3. DRUPAL:
Despite this project's reaching 99% translation status, on the Status
of Translation page on the Drupal website:
http://drupal.org/translation-status
Arabic is around 77% (which is good, I had anticipated a much lower
percentage). The reason for this difference is that the Drupal
repository on the Arabeyes CVS has virtually not been touched in
almost 6 months.

Alaa, even if you dont have the time or resources to actually
translate for the project at this time, please do a sync ASAP, and
then at least once every month. We might be able to find someone
willing to contribute to it. But as it stands, the project _looks_
complete on Arabeyes and in no need of contribution, the reality is it
does need help like all our other projects. Help us to help it.

4. FREEDESKTOP:
Uh-oh :-)
Arafat, even your email address is out of date on the project's
website (they have the old one, lumina at silverpen). Please try to
update that and give this project some TLC in the form of the sync.
Even if we dont do any translation at all and no one volunteers to
help, just regular syncs will show we have not forgotten about this
project and are simply waiting for contributors to come along.

5. GNOME:
We seem to be doing well in 2.10 branch, also well in 2.12 branch, not
so well in HEAD. Still we have not synced in about 2 months so its
high-time we did that again.

Also, Arafat, I know you like to work with tags instead of creating
branches, however I _STRONGLY_ encourage you to adopt this method and
create different branches for HEAD, 2.10 and 2.12 instead of lumping
everything into one branch. It will make your job a lot easier, be
less confusing for the rest of us, and more importantly be safer and
might prevent a disaster.

6. KDE:
Last sync was made 3 months ago. Not bad, but not good, not
withstanding the actual quality of the project's work, but more on
that later. Time for another sync in short.

7. MANDRAKE:
Apparently there is nothing or very little sync. Still, the "once a
month sync" rule should be applied here just for the sake of
beaurucracy. More importantly Youcef you need to change the project's
name to whatever they are calling it now :-p

8. MOZILLA:
I dont know what exactly is going on here. Firefox is completely
translated, so thats good, but we still need a sync so it doesnt fall
far behind (I'm only guessing that there is activity on the Mozilla
mothership. If there isnt then I guess no sync is needed). Its extra
hard work for this project to do a sync since they dont use POs as far
as I know.

As for Thunderbird, we need at least a status report on that. Ayman?

9. OPENOFFICE:
A sync has been made very recently and the project is extremely
active. Thank you Ossama! This is probably our most important
translation project and you seem to be very aware of that. Nice work!

10. PLONE:
Project is 100% completed on our CVS. Not sure how it is doing exactly
on the mothership since it is hosted on SourceForge. Mr. Elzubeir,
time for a sync. (There has been no sync since the intial import which
was 2 months ago).

11. WORDLIST:
This project needs no syncing AFAIK, its not a moving target. :-)

I should note, gentlemen, that the history logs on your project's
pages are there for your use. Every time you make a particularly
important sync, add something to that history log. It could have taken
me much less time to write this email if you had all done that :-)

Salam and thanks to all,

Abdulaziz,