[OSM-dev] Notes - OSM improvements BoF at SOTM PDX

[Tom Hughes]

On 17/10/12 22:17, Andy Allan wrote:

> On 16 October 2012 00:17, Tom Hughes <tom at compton.nu> wrote:
>
>> The way it works is this - you don't worry about translations as such at
>> all. You just make sure strings are translatable and we commit that and then
>> the translators get to work. Yes, when something new launches it will take a
>> while to get translated, but that is something we live with as a volunteer
>> project and it had worked perfectly well up to now.
>
> It hasn't worked perfectly well up to now - as you've just described.
> We should be able to make changes on a staging branch, get
> translations sorted, and push live with as little untranslated
> material as possible. The current situation, where it's impossible to
> get translations ahead of merging into master, along with translation
> updates being now-and-then rather than automatically fed back withing
> a few tens of minutes, is less than ideal.

Well yes I'm sure it would be absolutely lovely if we could do all that 
but I don't see it as realistic in a volunteer open source project.

Even if we had the technology you propose, how long do you think we 
should wait in the hope that translations arrived before pushing 
something like? Without paid translators we have no way of ensuring 
timely translations even if we do all the things you suggest...

I would certainly have no objection to a platform that would be able to 
feed things back more quickly, though 10 minutes might be rather painful 
unless we move away from keeping the translations in git.

Having to push everything through a lengthy period on a staging branch 
would be a major change in our modus operandi though, both in terms of 
increasing the time it took for changes to make it to production and in 
terms of significantly complicating my life.

Tom

-- 
Tom Hughes (tom at compton.nu)
http://compton.nu/