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Re: [babel-dev] Release review needed for Babel

>From my experience, I think there is now room for two separate efforts:

-a nice server to hold your translations
That would be a webapp, something people will adopt to hold their translations.
That part is stable, and we may just miss some screens to manage completely the web application from the UI. I'm thinking of defining release trains for example.

-a framework to produce language packs
The current solution at Eclipse is satisfying, even though we are doing more and more plumbing. For some organizations, needs may vary, the scripts need to be modified slightly (for example at Intalio, we may only want to package the  Japanese translations at some point, for a particular customer).

Also, people like Sean, with no PHP experience, didn't feel like they could hack their way into producing language packs. Since then, he provided a lot of help, but at first he was telling me he didn't feel too confident about it.
I believe we should tell people that we were able to fulfill our needs through our own php script, but that they can certainly hack their way into the server, using Ruby, Java, or reusing our PHP script, to do their own thing.
I had gotten started making a nice configurable PHP framework to deal with producing fragments and features, but I never got around polishing it.

So all in all, catch users with a shiny webapp, and let them come up with patches to help with extracting fragments from the system.

Thanks,

Antoine

On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 11:00, Denis Roy <denis.roy@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I think Antoine raises some good points.  The server has enough features and stability to be a 1.0, however it is lacking in the packaging and out-of-box installation experience.  This is the polish I was referring to.

Phoenix doesn't do releases, simply because the project's purpose is not to build extensible tools and frameworks, but to improve the website in an open and transparent fashion.  I'm not sure if the Babel server is generic enough to be considered an extensible tool or framework, although you (Antoine) have deployed it in house at some point, so you are the best one to tell us if the server could/should be a generic tool.

So the question is: should we invest effort into packaging the server as a tool for public consumption, or should we just keep it as an internal (but open source) tool for the purpose of producing language packs?

Regardless of the response, I agree with Antoine that, in its current state the server cannot be a 1.0.



Antoine Toulme wrote:
I think that before we do a release of the Babel server, we'd need to make it available in some way. A zip, with complete instructions to install, a mockup of the cron jobs to set up, is needed imo.

It would also be interesting to decide if the Babel server is for the Eclipse internal use only. If that's the case, I'm not sure we need a release ; by the way did the Phoenix project had a release ?

Last but not least, going 1.0 at Eclipse means you define a set of APIs, and you tatoo them on your left arm, I mean you will need to maintain them. I would rather shoot for a nice 0.9 release.

I agree that we should release though as we are starting to have quite a backlog on the IP side. Every time you release, you flush the IP log and you make sure everything is ok.

Thanks,

Antoine

On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 09:35, Denis Roy <denis.roy@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The Force is strong with this one.

I will start mocking up the slides.

Denis

Kit Lo wrote:

I have a slightly different opinion about the mature components. Although the Message Editor is pretty standalone and complete, but we never made a downloadable build for that. The testing of the component was very limited. Nigel is the only contributor who is familiar with the component. But, he is not very active because of other commitments. I'm a little concern about the enhancement and maintenance requests when we make it available.

On the other hand, I agree that the Translation Server still needs some polish. But, Babel has been consuming the Translation Server for a while. The Translation Server has gone through quite a bit of testing and we've made a lot of enhancement. We also heard a few testimonials that a few organizations are using that to perform Eclipse project translation in-house. Also, Denis, Gabe, Antoine, and me (and a new comer Sean :-) are somewhat familiar with at least some parts of the Translation Server. We may not have enough resources to implement major enhancement for the translation server in a timely manner, but I'm pretty sure we can handle some general maintenance and bug reports.

Therefore, I'm voting to consider the Translation Server as a mature component, instead of the Message Editor :-)

Regards,
Kit Lo
IBM Eclipse SDK Globalization Technical Lead
Eclipse Babel Project Co-lead



Denis Roy <denis.roy@xxxxxxxxxxx>
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06/18/2009 04:59 PM

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[babel-dev] Release review needed for Babel







Team,

I was discussing with Kit yesterday, and I mentioned that before we can announce a "Babel 1.0" GA release, we need to hold a release review.  Essentially, we need to follow the steps outlined in this document:

http://wiki.eclipse.org/Development_Resources/HOWTO/Release_Reviews

There was also the question of whether or not the Messages Editor would be part of that release review.  Do we consider the Messages Editor mature enough for a 1.0, and moving forward, will we have any resources committed to maintaining it and carrying it forward?

For what it's worth, I think the only two components we are considering "mature enough" for this release is the Language Packs and the Messages Editor.  The Translation Server, although it works quite well for Babel, still needs some polish.

Thanks,

Denis


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