How to handle JIRA issues about translations

Hi devs,

I noticed https://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-17168 and I saw that it was put under the “Notifications” component and thus that it would appear in the Release Notes for 12.3RC1.

From a process POV, I wonder if this issue should show up in our release notes (RN) since it’s related to translations. Ideally this change should be made on l10n.xwiki.org and if that were the case it would’t appear in our RN. Actually, if this one appears then I’d venture that any translation change from l10n should also appear as a jira issue in the RN. So my POV is that we should either put this issue under the “development issue only” component or create a new component (such as “translation”) and exclude that one too in our RN filters. IMO if we introduce a new “translation” component it’s going to be mis-used and devs/contributors might use it when there are missing translation keys. So my preference goes to using “development issue only”. Actually we could rename this component to something a bit different if we think it’s a problem, such as “Internal issue during development” or something like this.

TBH, I’d say we don’t and even shouldn’t have an issue for a translation change. So we have the option of closing this issue as “invalid”. But I’m also fine to keep since it’s been created now (but I’d recommend not creating unnecessary issues, see https://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Community/DevelopmentPractices#HRule:Don27tcreateunnecessaryissues).

So do we agree about using the “development issue only” component for this issue and for all issues related to translations (not translation keys). And to recommend not creating issues for translation changes and using [Misc] instead?

Thanks

I remembered that there was some rule about “avoid commits without jira issues”, but I guess I misremembered that part. (I have to admit I did not try to look it up.)

I just changed the issue’s component to “development only” as I fully agree this issue should not be in the release notes. If I can just check in typos without creating a jira issue for it with [misc] in the commit message I am fine with that, too.

I would make personally a distinction between what’s translation: a string translated in another language and source text: the default source text to display in our standard language and which is used as base for all other translations.

I agree that the first one should never appear in the RN. For the second one, it’s a bit more unclear, since changing a source text might have several reason and it could be seen indeed as a UI bug.

I’m -1 since I find it interesting if external people (not committers) submit issues about what they found as bad source text. Even if it’s only about wrong translation, it means people care about the quality and it’s a bit rewarding to see an issue really closed and not marked as invalid :slight_smile:

+1

Definitely +1 when it’s about committers, but I wouldn’t blame users if they do create issues for that.