Pidgin 2.7.2 released!

[Javier Fernandez-Sanguino]

2010/7/25 John Bailey <rekkanoryo at rekkanoryo.org>:
> On 07/25/2010 08:32 AM, David Woolley wrote:
>> Then submit enough translations of the text in the installer to push it
>> above 50%.
>
> David is correct--if you translate more than half of the Windows Installer
> strings in your .po file, then the language will be an available option in the
> installer language selector.  Selecting a language there will cause Pidgin to
> run in the selected language.

Quite sincerely, this new policy is IMHO quite absurd. Even though the
nsis installer text might not be fully translated the overall PO
statistics for Spanish were quite high (IIRC over a 90% update ratio).
Which means the program *was* translated almost fully even if the
installer strings were not.

The Pidgin team should have been more careful when implementing the
policy and should have warned the translation teams that the languages
were going to be disabled *before* disabling them.

I know of similar policies (for example, we implement them in the
Debian GNU/Linux Installer) and

1) they are based on the overall status of the PO file, not a subset of it
2) translators *and* translator teams are forewarned (directly, not
through a mailing list) before any language is disabled in order to
give them the oportunity to react


>> It is unlikely to be an error, but much more likely to be the policy
>> that the translations be at least 50% complete.
>
> The 50% requirement is imposed by the perl script we use to extract installer
> strings from the .po files.  We could trivially change this, but in my opinion,
> forcing translators to translate enough to create an installer that's actually
> useful in a given language is a good thing.

Again. This policy is not a good idea. If a policy was set it should
be based on the overall translation status of the program, not of the
installer itself. The fact is: users cannot easily install the
'language' component and enable it through the GUI, they have to go
through some hoops and find the FAQ (which is not installed with the
program itself) and find out that in order to enable the translation
they have to install the component and change the registry.

It also generates an inconsistent behaviour of Pidgin between Linux
and Windows users:users of Linux distributions get all the languages
and will "see" those thy set their locale to, Windows users will only
"see" the one the Installation systems provides them with. Moreover,
the behaviour is inconsistent with *new* Windows users and wilth *old*
users: those users that 'upgrade' Pidgin from versions previous to
2.7.1 will see their *old* setting.

I'm not a Windows users myself, and the few times I use Pidgin in
Windows I upgrade the client (which explains why I hadn't seen this
issue). In the Spanish case, this policy results in not providing a
translation that is actually quite complete for the *program* which
results in less Spanish-speaking users using the program itself and,
in the long term, means less userbase for Pidgin. In the long term,
this is actually bad for Pidgin.

Finally, just a remark: I would have expect a direct (personal not
mailing list) e-mail to forewarn me of this, specially consideing that
Spanish is one of the most used/spoken languages in the world and
Pidgin has a Spanish translator that has been updating the PO
translation for over 8 years.


Regards

Javier