Recent discussions

[Youcef Rabah Rahal]

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On Friday 25 June 2004 07:04, Sarah Wang wrote:
> Hi all,

Hi,

> I have to say that the past two or three days is the most exciting
> period of this mailing list since Fedora Translation Project started :)
> It's great to have so many people join the discussion and give their
> opinions from different perspectives.

Indeed :-)

> I'd like to explain a few things raised among the discussions.
>
> 1. About CVS access.
> Someone mentioned that it was too easy to get a CVS account. True.
> Currently anyone who has a valid email address can be granted CVS access
> to the commit locale of his/her choice. It was because in the early
> phase of the project we'd like to encourage people to participate and to
> start forming teams. There is no way to know or qualify people - on what
> basis should we give someone access to cvs while denying others? If the
> person is a GNOME or KDE coordinator then he/she should be the default
> coordinator for Fedora? There is no convincing formula. I believe by
> adopting an open policy then close the loopholes and fixing problems as
> they arise will maximise the community participation. (BTW, your cvs
> account has very limited rights, so don't even think of misuse it ;) ).
> It is easier to add features and put limitations on accounts than to
> remove features/restrictions. In the future process development, we may
> be able to have different level of cvs accounts. For example, a
> proofreader's account may have more rights than a new translator's
> account.

Sounds reasonable to me.

> 2. Coordinator's role
> I believe a coordinator's role is not *to control* how things should be
> but to stay *in control* of how things are. People participate one
> project naturally form groups. Some are small - relatively easy to
> coordinate and come to a resolution. Some groups are quite large with
> hundreds of members - it's quite a task to keep things organised and
> come to a consensus on discussions. For any languages that don't have a
> separate mailing list yet, I'd like to see the translators of the same
> language discover each other and form a group. If there are five or more
> people in the group, just elect your own coordinator and send me an
> email to request a separate mailing list.

BTW, we are more than 5 translators, yet we don't have an 'ar' mailing list. 
We do all our posts via 'doc at arabeyes dot org'.

> 3. Tools vs. Teamwork
> Tools will never eliminate the need of teamwork. The new status page is
> designed to ease the work involved in coordination. For smaller groups,
> it may be very effective to notify through mailing list about the work
> he/she is undertaking, but for groups with hundreds of members it's hard
> to track who is doing what through mailing list notification. It may
> seem cumbersome to have to go through take/release when you know you are
> the only translator out there :) but it may not be the case tomorrow,
> someone else may signed up to be a translator and want to help out.
> There are lots of things tools cannot replace teamwork, such as quality
> control, vocabulary consistency etc, but tools (or we hope to
> develop/modify tools) could help with those activities. The status page
> or any future enhancement is by no means a replacement for teamwork.
>
> 4. Red Hat people
> Fedora project is Red Hat sponsored open source project, naturally you
> will see plenty of people with "redhat.com" email address. That doesn't
> mean anything said by anyone at redhat.com is official. Like everyone here,
> he/she is also a participant/contributor. Fedora is a community project
> and anyone participate the project should respect the community, Red Hat
> people is no exception.

Noted :-)

> Last but not the least, I know it's pretty hard to stay cool in a heated
> discussion but please keep in mind when you post to this mailing list
> that everyone is entitled to his/her opinion and we may have different
> approaches but we all have the same goal. All constructive suggestions,
> debates, and criticisms are welcome in this list.

Fully agreed.

Thank you Sarah for this summary, which sounds very fine to me :-) There are 
still however some open questions:

1- Why no one on this list seemed to be aware of the new system ? 
[critisism] :-)

2- What about the teams/maintainers who are already in place ? When will you 
elect the new maintainers ? And how will that be done ?

Regards,

- -- 
Youcef R. Rahal
Arabeyes.org
http://www.arabeyes.org/~rahal
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