Debian Installer Hebrew translation reached 100% for levels 1-4

Today I noticed that the d-i translation to Hebrew reached 100% at levels 1-4 on the SVN. This is the first time it happens for levels 3-4 since I started the translation back at 2004.

Although the Hebrew translation started as a personal project, in the last 9 months I got help from several people: Amit Dovev, Baruch Even, Katriel Traum and Meital Bourvine. With this joint effort, level 1 was reviewed for typos and levels 2-3 were completed. Thanks you all.

As level 5 contains too much technical (error) messages, I decided not to invest time with its translation. So from now on it’s mainly keeping the status quo of translation rate for Hebrew…

When Christian suggested to translate d-i to Hebrew:

> Lior Kaplan
> Israel

Ahem, by the way….Hebrew installation is missing…:-)

I didn’t imagine reaching this point, as the translation started without any bidi (BiDirectional) support for d-i. Only after Debconf4 I could actually read my translations in d-i’s nightly builds:

We can also mention that hard work was made on BiDirectional languages support, mostly by Steve Langasek, which was jailed by myself for some nights in the “d-i hack lab”… :-).

Working on the translation later triggered more contribution for Debian, which later made me start the NM process. So please “blame” Christian for me becoming a DD (:

Status of the Firefox bug triage (and what I learned from triaging bugs)

The Firefox bug triage started a month ago, with the goal of verifying the relevance of bugs reported against the firefox package, which isn’t present any more in unstable.

From the 324 bugs I started with, 37 have been closed and 85 were verified. The latter were reassigned to the Iceweasel package and got the necessary version info. 165 bugs are still pending for verification.

Additional 37 bugs are forwarded to the Mozilla bugzilla, most of them are open for a long time. Help with forwarding more upstream bug to the bugzilla is always welcome.

The status of the triage is available at the firefox bugs’ page.

During my recent bug triages (openoffice.org, cvs, firefox), I think we need to add a “be kind to QA people” section along with the “be kind to porters” one. I encountered a few people thought the goal of the triage was to bother them than to get bugs solved (or at least ease the maintainer to attend to them).

One even got an angry reply back after complaining too much about getting an extra mail:

I must say that I don’t understand your lake of patience. So you got another mail… we all get dozens of them everyday. I invest time in doing the ugly QA work, and I don’t I deserve this attitude.

But on the other hand, I had a few people thanking for the fact that someone invested time in their reports, and others that were patient regarding a few mistakes I made.

One conclusion I have from the triage process – our DDs don’t use versioning info enough. This makes going over reports harder and more time consuming. It also harder for the maintainer to figure out if the bug is still relevant for a new version.

Status of the CVS bug triage

The CVS bug triage was started two and a half weeks ago. Considering the time frame, it’s going great.

I started with 145 open bugs, and 3 forwarded to upstream (which doesn’t keep track of old bugs, AFAIK). And now only 53 (about 1/3) of the bugs still wait for confirmation about their status. During the triage, 38 bugs were closed and around 50 bugs were verified to still be relevant.

All these numbers means that CVS has 57 bugs which are pending and verified to occur in the latest version. At least 10 of them can be solved quite easily as they have patch or an explanation good enough to be considered as a patch. The rest should probably require more work from the maintainers and upstream.

During the triage, a lot of work was invested in reproducing bugs when the submitters said they can’t do that themselves anymore (not using CVS or not using Debian). Another bunch of of bugs got better tags (mostly patch tag) and up-to-date version info to ease the maintainers’ future work on the package.

The bugs waiting for verification bugs were user tagged so they can be followed easily. Help with those is always welcome.

Triaging bugs – continued

While the Firefox/Iceweasel triage is in progress, and it is going quite well with about 1/3 of the bugs already being handled (most of them still exist), I started a triage for the cvs package.

As cvs has “only” 145 bugs, I could apply some of the suggestions people offered (mostly by complaining on -devel) . I started with doing a quick maintenance for the bugs, verifying some easy ones, merging similar reports and even found one already fixed. Another side of this was to add the missing version info for some bugs.

Note for DDs: Don’t forget to add version info when reassigning a bug.

The bugs were chosen based on version info, and everything reported to a version older than 1:1.12.13-1 will be pinged. I must admit I wasn’t sure about how to approach a few 1 to 9 years old bugs, mostly feeling ashamed we (as a project) still haven’t fixed/answered them by now.

The next target for triage is aptitude, which should be a more difficult triage as it has 450 open bugs. I don’t know when I’ll start it, probably depends on how well will the ongoing triages will end.

Firefox bug triage

Today, I started doing the Firefox bug triage. A request to reproduce or close bugs was sent to 324 bugs’ owners. Most of the bugs were reported against Firefox version 1.5 (or lower).

As some people responded quite quickly, about 10 bugs were closed and another 10 were reproduced (or confirmed to still be relevant). The latter got reassigned to Iceweasel for further handling by the maintainer.

I hope people will continue to be responsive…

If someone wishes to follow this triage, simply look at the Firefox bugs list.