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   There will surely be some discussion about this messages after the
packages are finally released.  If people now send you some proposals
for better messages, how do you proceed?  Jim, please note that right
now, as I put forward nearly a dozen of localizable programs, I receive
both the translations and the coordination concerns about them.

   If I put one of my things to pretest, Ulrich receives the
announcement and passes it on to the German team, who make last minute
revisions.  Then he submits the translation files to me _as the
maintainer_.  For free packages I do not maintain, I would not even
hear about it.  This scheme could be made to work for the whole
Translation Project, I think.  For security reasons, maybe Ulrich
(national coordinators, in fact) should update central registry kept at
the Translation Project (Jim, me, or Len's recruits) once in a while.

   In December/January, I was aggressively ready to internationalize
all of GNU, giving myself the duty of one small GNU package per week or
so, taking many weeks or months for bigger packages.  But it does not
work this way.  I first did all the things I'm responsible for.  I've
nothing against some missionary work on other maintainers, but I'm also
loosing a lot of energy over it--same debates over again.

   And when the first localized packages are released we'll get a lot of
responses about ugly translations :-).  Surely, and we need to have
beforehand a fairly good idea about how to handle the information flow
between the national teams and the package maintainers.

   Please start saving somewhere a quick history of each PO file.  I
know for sure that the file format will change, allowing for comments.
It would be nice that each file has a kind of log, and references for
those who want to submit comments or gripes, or otherwise contribute.
I sent a proposal for a fast and flexible format, but it is not
receiving acceptance yet by the GNU deciders.  I'll tell you when I
have more information about this.