Request for pre-announcement of release dates

Hello,

This is a follow up from discussion I tried to have with Gimp developers/maintainers at FOSDEM 2025.

As the audio had some problems I decided to repeat what I said.
We (translators) need preannouncements for Gimp releases since we need to submit them in time in order to be included with the release when it is tagged.

A translation that is not included with the release is not seen/used by the general public.

What we need is the same we had with these topics:

I am aware that the pressure with GIMP 3.0 imminent release it may be hard to do this and there may be surprises. I am also aware that most probably after 3.0 is released there will be many more 3.x releases as people will start using and filing bugs.

At some point however things will go to more normal state and regular cadence. As a translator coordinator I would still like to know a release is coming in advance so we can maintain a good translation.

(tagging @jehan for visibility).

Kind regards

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Yeah, there was a weird reverb-like effect for us on the stage, rendering anything going via the sounds system pretty much unintelligible. I even had problems understanding what Jehan said right next to me, when he was speaking via the microphone.

Next time I’ll be on a stage like this, I’ll definitely be at the sound check the day before and also have someone from the audience area ask questions then and there. My suspicion is that one of the buttons on the desk might have given easy control of this situation to the speakers, if they knew what to do.

Jehan wrote a comment in the ongoing GIMP 3.0.0 string freeze thread about GIMP 3.0.0 RC3 9 days ago:

I assume that we assumed that translators would be following this thread for further updates.

Thanx for that. I am not sure translators will universally see the issue but in any case I subscribed to that issue. Perhaps having a special tag on release issues that people can subscribe to may help.
Best wishes with the release and hope all goes as planned.

Hi @al_shopov! Yes, as I said already when we spoke together, we already have the “pre-announcement of releases”. As shown in the link given by @schumaml, this is part of our checklist for each and every release! And it is the second item in our checklist! So it’s not even an option, or a “maybe” or “if we think about it”… It will be each and every time.

For GIMP 3.0.0, as noted in this report, we did open a thread already: GIMP's `master` branch string freeze

We updated this thread at every RC (e.g. for RC3). Not only this, every time we had a small update which may interfere with translations, we made a note about it in the thread.

These other threads you linked are other examples of such announcements (from the same release procedure), since we have been doing these since forever (actually since even before my time; back then my co-maintainer used to do the announcement threads on the GNOME internationalization mailing list; but all mailing lists are gone now and we were specifically asked to do these on Discourse instead; which we do! :smile:).

It’s not hard, we do it every time, and we will continue to do it. :slight_smile:

As for accurate release dates, translators are the people who get the most accurate dates (additionally to developers), though these should never be considered as promises (e.g. the RC3 was not released last Saturday as I hoped; I clearly underestimated the ability to hack code while at FOSDEM!).

But anyway, if anything, actual release dates will either be on time or after “hoped” release dates (the ones noted in announcements to translators), not before.

The Discourse forum is, as far as we know, the only way left which was given to us to interact with translators (well apart from the Gitlab tracker itself, which you should feel very free to follow too). And in fact, we were specifically asked to make our announcements to translators there (I asked back when the mailing list was discontinued).

If this is not right, please see with other translator teams, then come back to us after and tell us how to make announcements instead. We are happy to comply to any reasonable process (and this current process is exactly what we did!) and we will just update our checklist. But please do this in agreement with other teams. We don’t want a different process per language team (we have 83 translations of GIMP so far!). :sweat_smile:

That’s what we do with the i18n tag on Discourse (combined with the GIMP tag).

Our announcement for GIMP 3.0.0 release is even the fifth thread at the top of the i18n tag at time of writing with 2200 views! So it looks like it has been quite “seen”! :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Now again: if you believe the procedure can be improved (of course it can; any procedure can be improved!), or a better/more accurate tag is needed, please discuss with other translator teams and come up with an accurate and unique procedure. Then just tell us. We’ll simply update our checklist, no questions asked (well… unless you propose something which seems really convoluted and time-wasting with doubtful reasons! :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:). All we want is to have translators happy and to have a simple procedure to follow, and repeat each and every time. We don’t want to “improvise” during a release.

Thanks! :hugs:

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