[Orekit Developers] Preparing Orekit 6.0 release

[MAISONOBE Luc <luc.maisonobe@c-s.fr>]

Hi all,

The 6.0 version of Orekit is nearly complete now. The Project  
Management Committee recently gave its go ahead for the release. The  
major features desired for this version are implemented and the  
version 3.2 of the Apache Commons Math library we need has been  
officially released a few days ago. The Orekit development team is  
currently closing the latest issues. The target release date for  
version 6.0 is before the end of the month.

One remaining thing is the update of the error messages translations  
in various languages. We would be happy if some of our users could  
contribute to this task, either by providing translations or reviewing  
the messages we already have. We already have initial files for  
English, French, Galician, German, Italian, Spanish and Norse  
languages but we would be happy to add any other languages the  
community may provide.

The translation files are available on the forge here:  
<https://www.orekit.org/forge/projects/orekit/repository/revisions/master/show/src/main/resources/assets/org/orekit/localization>, they will be updated as we receive translations. These are simple Java properties files, with non-ASCII characters encoded using unicode conventions (this mean we can support any writing systems). Creating a file for a new language simply means copying one of the existing files and changing the translated text. Even incomplete translations would be welcome, the missing text being replaced by the "<MISSING TRANSLATION!>" marker which is automatically recognized by the library (in which case the English message is used instead of the native language one, so there is no loss of information for  
users).

Of course, translation contributors are credited for their work and  
their names will appear in the <contributors> section in the  
distribution.

If you want to contribute, you can create an issue in our tracking  
system <https://www.orekit.org/forge/projects/orekit/issues> and  
attach you contributed files to it. If you don't know the proper  
unicode encoding for specific characters, just use your native  
encoding when storing the file and tell us which encoding you used  
(standard ISO or platform specific encodings). We will take care to do  
the conversion. If you want to review or update an existing file and  
cannot read the existing unicode encoding, just ask us and we will  
provide you a version of the file with ISO accented characters.

Thanks you in advance for your contributions.

Luc, on behalf of the Orekit team

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