Greetings doc geeks,
We need to improve our translations system for various reasons:
A. It's difficult to work with:
Honestly I don't know how translators put up with the current system
and think it helps contribute to dead translations. Many kudos go to
the translators!
B. A new VCS is forcing a change:
One day soon the PHP project will move from CVS to a new VCS, likely
either Subversion or Git. This presents a real problem because we rely
on CVS revision numbers for tracking the translations status.
C. Translating markup and related worries:
Whether or not an XML markup change affects translations shouldn't be
on our minds, but today it must be. Currently all changes, markup or
otherwise, affect the status of a translation. Ideas were explored to
help solve this symptom but nothing great came about.
So we must change our process, but how? We have a few options:
1. Keep the current system, and simply change the revision handling
2. The same as (1) but with a few other tweaks
3. Totally rethink the system
I'm in favor of (3) but personally don't know the topic well enough to
comfortably design it. My gut says move towards a gettext based system
with po/pot files but again it's not something I've used personally
but do know others have and like it, that other large manuals use it
with success, and that many tools exist to manage this including po
specific text editors. And because several projects already do this we
could evaluate several and decide what would work best for us. And, of
course steal their HOWTO information ;)
Please, all comments, complaints, questions and suggestions are
welcome. Especially from translators!
Regards,
Philip
P.S. Please only reply to phpdoc@lists.php.net, this initial email CCs
all doc lists to notify everyone of the topic.
