[development] Translations for HEAD and a possible string freeze

[Walt Daniels]

Many commercial software vendors handle international releases by having a
slightly delayed release date a few weeks after the English version
releases. Once the English release you know things are fairly stable and you
can do a little polishing of the international ones. 

-----Original Message-----
From: development-bounces at drupal.org [mailto:development-bounces at drupal.org]
On Behalf Of Angela Byron
Sent: Friday, August 25, 2006 12:44 PM
To: development at drupal.org
Subject: Re: [development] Translations for HEAD and a possible string
freeze

>
> 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 agree strongly in principle with this approach, because I fully recognize
the problems associated with creating translations -- even if the wording
changes by one letter you have to re-do work.

The practical problem, however, is that documentation/rewording patches are
among the last to get in. This is both because they're  
"gold-plating"   stuff, often only addressed after all the "major"  
bugs are taken care of, but also because functionality/paths/etc. can still
change between a code freeze and a release, so you end up re- writing
documentation (and thus translations) if you write it too early.

I'd therefore really appreciate it if we could tie the string freeze to a
major project milestone such as beta 1 (or even, preferably, RC
1 if that would give enough time), rather than an arbitrary date. We simply
have no idea what HEAD will look Sept. 1 or how long it will take to get it
stable enough that documentation writers can go in and do their thing.

-Angie



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