Proposed String freeze: Not yet in 1.9.3 but hopefully in 1.9.4

Christian Stimming stimming at tuhh.de
Sat Mar 18 06:03:03 EST 2006


Dear developers,

As discussed here and on IRC before, we plan to have a String Freeze period 
between sometime now and the 2.0.0 release. This should give the translators 
the time necessary to achieve full translation. More information about the 
purpose and what it means is on http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/String_Freeze

But before we actually go into string freeze, we need to double-check two 
things: 
1. Did we mark all necessary strings for translation, so that no string 
additions will be necessary before 2.0.0? 
2. Can all English strings be left unchanged for the 2.0.0 release?

To answer #1, several translators (e. g. Tor Harald for Norwegian, myself for 
German) have been working hard to already translate as much as possible, 
because when running a 100% translated application every 
unmarked/untranslated string can be identified very easily. In that respect I 
think we're pretty good; Tor still recently discovered some string that have 
been missed before, but I have been checking many parts of gnucash for months 
except the business module, and since Tor's discoveries are only in the 
business module I'd figure the rest is in pretty good shape.

However, the answer to #2 IMHO is not so good so far. Recently I tried to use 
the reports in SVN for the first time seriously, and I was rather unhappy 
about a lot of things there. One particular problem are the option wordings 
and their explanations in many of the newly introduced options, where "newly" 
basically refers to the changes by David Montenegro in June/July 2004 (I'll 
note other non-translation problems in a separate email). These option 
wordings and their explanations really need some serious review. For example, 
a choice "Recursive Balance" in the multichoice option "Parent account 
balances" is very badly named and cannot be understood easily; the word 
"recursive" doesn't exist in a financial context, only in programmers' 
minds :-) . So it's pretty clear to me we need to change a bunch of strings 
in those report options in order to achieve the same level of consistency and 
understandability that we had in 1.8.x. This option wording review needs time 
for sure.

Therefore I propose not to have a String freeze with the upcoming 1.9.3, but 
instead try to finish the string-related work soon so that we can have an 
official String Freeze with the 1.9.4 release, scheduled for April 2nd, 
http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Release_Schedule . 

Nevertheless it would be very good to make a 1.9.3 bugfix release this Sunday 
(tomorrow) as planned.

Christian


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