Release procedure

[Roland Illig]

David Martin wrote:
> I think that most translator are part time or even little time 
> collaborators and some/most of them may have problems with this tight
>  scheduling. On the other hand, I know that scheduling is a must.

> Is it possible to open the 10 days translation period making sort of 
> an "interface freeze" where no translatable strings may be changed? 
> Any sort of pre-warning such as "be ready for next release in 1 
> month"? I know that lately we've had too many of these warnings :).

I don't have any experience in this field, so it's just my first
suggestion. At least it's better than the three days we had before. :)

I am planning to have more releases of mc than we had in the last four
years (that is: exactly one), so even if a translator is "too late", his
work will show up some months later in the next release.

> I'm not sure if I would manage to deal with CVS branches. I've always
> done updates to the HEAD. Some help may be needed at this point (at
> least for me), or even open an alternate channel for sending
> translations (mc-devel?, direct e-mail?).

The CVS branches thing should be completely invisible for translators. 
That's what the developers are for. My idea was that the translators 
just get a mail short before a release telling them where to download 
the translation template (mc.pot), the current translation (e.g. de.po) 
and (if necessary) the complete prerelease (mc-*.tar.gz) for looking up 
the strings in the code. Then they send their work back to the mc-devel 
list and they're done.

If it should become necessary we could even create a new mailing list 
mc-translators, but I'd like to try the simple version first. :)

Roland