Proposal: reorganizing i18n

[Vinzenz Vietzke]

Hi there,

I recently went through many parts of Xfce's i18n infrastructure and
documentation. To make it short: lot's of old stuff, many things
unmaintained but truly a lot of useful gems grown throughout the years.

So following up is my proposal for reorganizing i18n in Xfce, split into
two phases. I put it up on this list to reach more people.


A. Short term

1. Dump mailing lists. One list (xfce-i18n) is enough and for
language-specific questions, discussions a short [LANG] tag added to the
email topic should do the distinction job.
Bonus: questions might be answered quicker as more people read them.

2. Before dumping email all lists subscribers directly and (of course)
telling them about. Plus asking them if they are on this list alread
and, which is even more important, if they would like to help out on
Transifex.

3. Transifex needs coordinators for every language. If there is no one
coordinating a language there should be some "super-coordinators" as
backup. These persons shouldn't be devs or at least not core devs.
Stacking work leads to problems.


B. Long term (mostly RFC)

1. Ease up the introduction process. Someone dropping by at Transifex
sees the need of some translation work in his language. If he decides to
register at TX, to join team *and* do work: yeah, cool!
But forcing him to additionally join the mailing list and introduce
himself is a major blocking thing. I guess it's something from the
pre-Transifex days where quality assurance had to be done manually. But
with the split of translators & reviewers over TX this should be obsolete.

2. Wiki needs clean up. There are lots of really, really useful things.
But as well there is lots of ancient, outdated stuff. Unfortunately most
stuff is mixed so there needs to be manual work done.
TBD: a process of cleaning up, either dumping everything and rebuilding
or the other way around.

3. Revise the use of Transifex. It's not self hosted and it's
proprietary but it does the job. There are up- and downsides of it so in
the light of the Git hosting discussion TX should also be reconsidered
*openly*.


Generally speaking I'd step up for both doing "dirty jobs" as well as
coordination work.
Thanks for your time reading this!

Looking forward to your comments,
vinz.
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