TerryE wrote:Surely this practice doesn't make sense.
It does make sense, the major fact being that the phpBB team does not speak all languages provided on the download page.
TerryE wrote:What's the point of having an integrated Issue tracking system, when you can't report bugs on software that you make available for download from your site? What is wrong with setting up a per-language queue assigned to each NL maintainer / team.
The problem wouldn't be setting up such a tracker, the problem would be getting it accepted by the translator community. Because (as I already pointed out above) we cannot fix those tickets, we cannot even say whether they are valid. Most translators probably don't want to use such a system, I even doubt most of them actually use a repository for versioning their files. Feel free to propose this in the translations forum at
http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewforum.php?f=66 but I doubt you'd have any luck, especially considering that we just recently moved the language packs into the system where we also maintain other contributions where we have per-contribution support sections.
TerryE wrote:If you don't want to do this then you should at least document this clearly as a policy and document that such bugs are to be reported to the named contact in the common.php or whatever, so that phpBB admins don't waste their time reporting such bugs and your team closing them.
The language files (including common.php) are under control of the translators, as far as I know they are free to provide such information in their files. The german language pack files for example do include information about where to report bugs and other errors. As for documentation/policy, the language pack download page says "Downloads, Details & Support" which should be a good enough indicator for reporting bugs.
TerryE wrote:In this case Andreas immediately passed the issue to Maël Soucaze who fixed it by return.
I did not, must have been someone else. He may have noticed himself because in this case the language pack maintainer is a phpBB team member.
TerryE wrote:This new page looks sexy, but from an admin's point of view, personally this is a backward step. (OK, I help support 13 forums, ten of which are the OOo National Language ones and for these I need to download 15 different language packs apart from the bundled EN language to do my upgrades. The previous page had consistent file naming and a consistent content hierarchy, so my build process had a nice BASH scripted for loop using wgets and unpacked the directories into the correct ref307 subdirectory. This time I had to do the downloads manually, the organisation of the (now mandatory) zip comes from some random URL, e.g /customise/db/download/id_77161, and the structure varies from pack to pack so that this became an interactive drag and drop affair, with no script log as an audit. End of moan!)
I agree on everything here. Ideally, everything would be backed by repositories where you can just install a language pack by adding svn:externals or the git equivalent.