[Libreoffice] LibreOffice WikiHelp discussion

Hi Sophie & all,

On Sat, 2010-12-11 at 14:35 +0300, Sophie Gautier wrote:
> I've search for your explanation on our list but didn't find them.
> Currently we (the localizer team) do not want the localized help to be
> uploaded on the wiki until we know about the localization process that
> will be in place.

        Well :-) this is not really for us to define; it is for the l10n team
to decide this, with us. We can give you some options of course - but it
is your call.

> We are the one doing the work and it's a very big work, so please, 
> answer the questions we have asked.

        Help us answer the questions. We are not going to impose something on
you that you don't want; and we can't make the decisions in a vacuum,
we're part of the same family - so lets try to collect requirements
together in a friendly way :-) If you have some, please knock up a wiki
page with them. Some are quite interesting, eg. the French localisation
legislation is fascinating and a new concept to me at least.

> So please, please again, answer the questions Martin asked, the 
> questions I asked, see Rimas and Jean-Baptiste mails too. And do not 
> open the wiki until we all agreed on the workflow, it's really important 
> for our localization team.

        So - there is no need to open the wiki for editing ever, if that is a
huge problem for people, and certainly we don't have to do this for 3.3,
and certainly we don't have to open the wiki so just anyone can turn up
from the street and spam it :-) [ it is easy to have approved
translators only eg. ]. We can provide solutions for off-line editing,
and there is certainly no need to switch tooling to make the wiki the
authoritative data source now / yesterday :-) we can do that in a
month / never if there is some insuperable problem.

        Anyhow, I suspect there are perhaps three problems here, none of them
truly technical:

        A. People are paranoid about developers dictating new tools
           to them that do not meet their needs / quality
                + but this isn't going to happen
                + and hassling people providing new options is not the
                  best way to have your requirements considered :-)

        B. Communication is bad: lots has been written to mailing lists
           but people are either not on those lists, or unable to filter
           the signal they want from the general noise
                + This is partly because Kendy is working extremely hard
                  and effectively on this, and...
                + mailing lists are the secondary developers' tool
                  after IRC, and few hackers are on the l10n lists (I
                  guess).

        C. We didn't package Windows help packs, and communicate them
           clearly for the off-line Windows help situation [ yet ! ]
           this is getting fixed however.

        Anyhow - summary - I think we don't have a big problem here - beyond
the communication issue. The answers to -all- Jean Baptiste's (good)
questions are either already answered (sometimes several times) on
various mailing lists, and/or simply not answered yet - they are open
questions. There is no need to fear the worst answer to each un-answered
question :-) hopefully together we will work out the best answer.

        It would be -extremely- helpful if some of those most eager to know the
answers to their questions, could create a suitable wiki page, with
their questions in it - *and* preferably do a quick search of Kendy's
mails to the dev list:

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libreoffice/2010-December/author.html

        Search for Jan Holesovsky in there, and collate the state of what is
there already into the page: it is not rocket science. Post the link,
and then we can work on any pending / un-answered questions.

        How does that sound ?

        Thanks,

                Michael.

-- 
 michael.meeks@novell.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot