Second beta, German translations, FOSDEM
Just in case some of you are wondering already – yes, we’re late with releasing the second beta of Xfce 4.6 by a few days. It’ll probably be released this weekend, so we won’t fall behind the schedule too much.
On Wednesday we had a very productive IRC meeting with the most active German translators being present. Plans we made on that evening include to clean up the team’s wiki page so that it only contains rules and hints that are directly useful for everyone. We also decided that we need a better communication channel than private mails or the Xfce i18n mailinglist, so we’re probably going to have a mailinglist focused on German translations. Other teams might have the same need, so we’d like to do it public and encourage other teams to do the same, maybe officially hosted on foo-projects.org.
Another idea was to take a look at some of the distributions shipping Xfce. Do they have a translation system on their own? Are there potential translators among the users/developers of these distributions? How can we motivate more people to take part in the translation process so that everyone is happy with the result?
We’ve decided to have another German team meeting next Wednesday at 21:00 CET (20:00 UTC). Feel free to join if you’re interested and your German is good.
Today, we had a little discussion about the upcoming FOSDEM in February 2009. Several of us have expressed an interest to go there. With 4.6 out of the door and 4.8 ahead February is a pretty interesting date for Xfce as a project. I’m sure we could come up with several nice presentations and discussions about the future if we were to apply for a developer room. Xfce has been part of FOSDEM in 2005 already but since then a lot of things have changed and many new developers have joined the project, so it would be a great opportunity to finally meet everybody and have a few pints together.
We haven’t decided on whether Xfce is going to apply yet as we’re planning to get the second beta released before. Deadline for developer room applications is 11/22, so we still have some time. Even better, the deadline for the schedule itself is three weeks before the actual event. Enough time to prepare some decent speeches.
I’m pretty excited about all this. There’s a quite a lot of movement in the Xfce community at the moment (and also, related to this movement, a lot of exciting things are happening for me, with UDS and all that). I feel that things are improving constantly in terms of development as well as organization and communication. Now all we need is a proper goal – and FOSDEM might be exactly what we need to discuss things like that.
2AM, time for bed. Have a nice day (or night).