[Mailman-Users] translate strings, not whole templates

[Brad Knowles]

On 1/19/08, jidanni at jidanni.org wrote:

>  So I would advise before calling for help translating, first relieve
>  each translator from the task of keeping the HTML house of cards
>  intact. Don't require them also to be a HTML expert. Just use one
>  English template, and substitute strings into that.

That's a nice idea.


Of course, Mailman is an open source project that is 100% volunteer 
supported in our non-existent free time, and we have very limited 
resources for development.  If you've spent any time on the Mailman 
pages at SourceForge, then you've seen all the hundreds of patches, 
requests for enhancement, etc... that have been filed.

If you took a look at the current Mailman 2.1.10 beta code and 
compared that to earlier versions, you would see how much has changed 
over the years since the 2.1.* tree was first branched.  And you 
would also see what kind of superhuman effort is put forth by people 
like Mark Sapiro, Tokio Kikuchi, Barry Warsaw and so many others.

If you took a look at the Mailman wiki, you would get a chance to get 
some sort of idea what the long-term roadmap is for Mailman 2.2.x, 
2.3.x, and even the mythical Mailman3, although because this is a 
100% volunteer supported project and all the principals have real 
jobs that they have to pay full-time attention to in order to put 
food on the table, there can never be any kind of firm timetable for 
when any of the proposed features may actually be delivered.


If you have useful code to contribute, we welcome that.  If you have 
useful translation experience to provide, we gladly welcome that.  If 
you have thousands or millions of dollars to donate to the project so 
that we can pay people to work full time on development for Mailman, 
we will be very glad to welcome that.

Otherwise, you're welcome to file your RFEs and get in line with everyone else.


You appear to have some knowledge of HTML, so you could at least file 
updated translations with appropriate templates and HTML structure, 
while we wait for whatever code improvements may be necessary so that 
the translation process is made easier and less error-prone.

Ask not what the Mailman project can do for you.  Ask what you can do 
for the Mailman project.

-- 
Brad Knowles <brad at shub-internet.org>
LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>