In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, "James A. Treacy" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Is there any mechanism in place for handling translations of Debian > documentation? I believe all the documentation is in CVS which is a > good start. We need to also set up CVS for any group that wishes to > translate documentation.
The Debiandoc Project is ahead of the curve on that count, since we already manage all documentation that we can in CVS (on cvs.debian.org). > Additionally, when there are multiple translations on a web site it > is much easier if the files are served using content > negotiation. This means that html files must have names in the > following format: <file>.<lang>.html Links from the main page could > explicitly point to pages in that language, but again, it is better > if links simply state <file> as this allows for partial translations > (if a file is not available in the preferred language, then the > english doc is served). > Can our current SGML system support something like this? If not, > how hard would it be to improve it? To be honest, I'm not completely clear on how we could extend our SGML system to accomodate multi-linguistic documentation and document maintenance. Ideally we should separate the Language Independant version of a document from the Lanugage Specific elements. Based on an initial assumption that all documentation under the purview of the DDP is Debiandoc-SGML, this is going to require us to pretty deeply carve up the Debiandoc DTD, I fear. An example of a full system to manage a document, focusing on "synopticism", i.e., keeping multi-linguistic documents up to date at all time, can be found in the article, "The Addition of a Multilingual Component to an Existing Document Processing System", <URL:http://www.sgmltech.com/papers/multilingual.htm>. > Currently there is a random set of translations of Debian > documentation on the web page. As they don't follow any guidelines, > it is difficult to mix them in with the english versions. Simply > renaming files is not the solution as this will break all the > links. Clearly we need a better solution. Yes, I think we need a system which is fully integrated with our SGML processing and version control system. Even if it means we have a bit of up-front work ahead of us. At the simplest, we could use SGML conditionals, in conjunction with some sugar in debiandoc2*... > The Debian web pages themselves are a different story. Every > language that so desires can have their own source directory in > which they can translate pages. Now that an annoying bug in apache > has been found, it works quite well. The problem with that scheme, for me, is that there is no "intra-page" sharing of information. I.e., if I have a chart of Debian archive directory structure, this has to be "cut-n-pasted" between language versions. .....A. P. [EMAIL PROTECTED]<URL:http://www.onShore.com/>
