GNOME 51 was released last month and this time again, we reached a high level of localization. 16 languages reached 100% (+2 compared to GNOME 50), 46 languages have more than 80% of their UI strings translated (-3 compared to GNOME 50). Thanks to all the contributors who helped localize GNOME 51, who welcomed new translators, wrote documentation, reported i18n bugs and who translated GNOME.

Some new features in Damned Lies

In addition to this localization cycle, our internationalization platform has improved. I shared a full changelog on the project release page. The most important features you will notice are:

• the ability to use git worktrees for big modules. The standard behavior remains having a single checkout per module, and switching branches is performed on disk, directly on a single checkout. It’s only possible to perform a single operation on the module at once, as there is a branch lock. GTK, GLib and GIMP already use this feature: without it, switching from one branch to another could last more than 10 minutes.
• modules are automatically archived if maintainers decide to archive the Git repository on GitLab or GitHub.
• a welcome message is now sent to new team members. Coordinators have to set it from the team detail page.
• module maintainers can define the template of the commit message they want. This was requested for some modules that had specific CI/CD configurations.

AI contributions

I received some contributions during this cycle that were LLM-assisted: either the code was generated by an LLM, or an LLM was used to analyze the codebase and detect defects. Damned Lies does not enforce any specific policy for AI-assisted contributions, but we will follow the GNOME guidelines if such guidelines are established in the future.

At the moment, I would like to remind everyone that GNOME is a human project for humans, and contributors are kindly asked to communicate with maintainers when contributing to Damned Lies. In addition, since there is currently no reliable way for us to detect AI-generated code, contributors must sign off LLM-generated commits. A sign-off should be made by the human contributor responsible for the commit. For example:

i18n: update translation handling

Update the translation handling to support the new workflow. 

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Signed-off-by: Jane Doe <jane@example.com>

Let’s start working on the next GNOME version!