[development] Translations for HEAD and a possible string freeze

[Konstantin Käfer]

Hi,

during the 4.7 release cycle, I have been very active translation
Drupal into my language (German). I thought that I'll share my
experiences with it.

If I recall it correctly, there has been a "string freeze", meaning
that strings will not change anymore from a certain date on.
Unfortunately almost nobody cared about that freeze and strings were
constantly changing. Having translated a string just find out that two
days later, the string has been dropped or tweaked is quite annoying.
In the first case, the work has been entirely superfluos, in the
second case, you have to search the whole string for the parts that
have changed - that can be even more sophisticated than translating
the entire string anew. However, I have to admit that those string
changes were necessary as they updated invalid URLs that have been
changed from 4.6 to 4.7.

I suggest that we'll do a string freeze for the HEAD version one month
after the code freeze. That would be October 1st. I think that this
would give documentation patches enough time to get in after the code
"freeze" (which is actually not a freeze as patches still go in, it's
more of a "feature freeze") while giving translators enough time to
update their translations for HEAD before it is released to the
public. I urge all developers to respect that "string freeze" and only
break it if absolutely necessary. That means, that all major
documentation patches should get in before October 1st.

If you have any suggestions, please don't hesitate to share them so we
can discuss them. I'd like to know if everybody is okay with the date
or if we should push or pull it.

Regards,
Konstantin