Yes, that's (fortunately) been the case and should continue to be the case.

Sure. There's little in a way that I need to add to what Andrea said. The black magic between the po files on Pootle and the rc / releases must remain separate from the task of translation. Pootle server is good, it allows on and offline collaboration, offline for example by downloading the po files and then editing them in a translation memory such as Virtaal which reduces the amount of re-translation.

There were and are (over on LO) no "signoffs" the way Mozilla has them. There are translation deadlines and if a locale has completed a sufficient amount of the UI by that date, then there will be a release in that language. I know we had this debate about release vs language pack; that should remain in the background, all the end user wants to know is that they can get OO with the UI in their language.

I'm not sure if the upload options come with Pootle or if they must be coded, i.e. you get the choice of Uploading and overwriting, Uploading and turning conflicts into suggestions etc. If they need to be coded manually, we can talk about that.

If you want to, you could sign up with the LO pootle server and I can give you rights in Scots Gaelic so you can see how it works? I'm just not sure what "comes with Pootle" and what doesn't, so perhaps the first thing to do would be to get it up and running and see what that gives you, perhaps with a small number of locales that we can test stuff with?

Since this is still fluid, I'd like to make an impassioned plea. We should set intelligent cutoffs (note the plural). For most localizers, the key part of OO/LO is Writer. But the localization process so far has required teams to complete x% of the total UI. This is very unhelpful and an obstacle to new locales, especially small ones. There's a possibility here of making AOO very attractive to new, small locales by introducing stepped localization i.e. we identify the strings which are in Writer and allow releases for locales which have completed just Writer, OpenOffice "light" in a sense. I know there's grey areas in between (i.e. which strings show up where) but even just excluding those which are clearly Draw/Calc/Database/Formula/Present makes localization more manageable. OO has gotten fairly big.

Beyond that, ideall you simply add and additional translations to a release but if someone argues heavily for doing it package by package i.e. once you finish Draw, you also get Draw localized UI, then I won't argue.

Michael