While reviewing the Rails Guide’s contribution guidelines, I came across an interesting policy regarding translations:
Note that translations are not submitted to the Rails repository; your work lives in your fork, as described above. This is because, in practice, documentation maintenance via patches is only sustainable in English.
This policy caught my attention, and I’m curious about the reasoning behind it. Why can’t translated versions be included in the official Rails codebase? I have a few thoughts on this:
- Is it due to the difficulty of ensuring that updates to the English documentation are consistently synchronized with other language versions?
- Could it be related to the challenges of reviewing and maintaining quality across multiple languages?
- Is there a concern about the potential for increased complexity in the main repository if it included all translations?
I’d love to hear from more experienced Rails contributors or maintainers about the rationale behind this approach. What are the pros and cons of keeping translations separate from the main repository?