International Samba (fwd)

[Tim Potter]

Rafal Szczesniak writes:

> It seems, nobody is interested in this issue... ;-)

Not true, it's just a really hard task.

> However, I try to carry on.
> My idea is to modify autoconf scripts so that, we introduce
> two configure-time parameters. For example:
> 
>   "--docs-lang" for specifying what docs' languages do we
>                 want to install
>   "--default-docs-lang" for specyifying which language will
>                 be default one
> 
> The first parameter is intended for use by different persons
> using ie. 2 or 3 languages. They could select it by issuing
> command:
>   man smb.conf.pl
>   man smb.conf.en
>   man smb.conf.fr

Isn't there internationalisation support as part of the GNU man
package?  I notice the russian linux manual pages have their own
subdirectory under /usr/share/man rather than having a language
suffix.

/usr/share/man/ru/man1
/usr/share/man/ru/man1/a2p.1.bz2
/usr/share/man/ru/man1/a2ps.1.bz2
/usr/share/man/ru/man1/apropos.1.bz2
/usr/share/man/ru/man1/ar.1.bz2
/usr/share/man/ru/man1/arch.1.bz2
/usr/share/man/ru/man1/as.1.bz2
/usr/share/man/ru/man1/at.1.bz2
/usr/share/man/ru/man1/basename.1.bz2
/usr/share/man/ru/man1/biff.1.bz2

I expect some systems will not support this layout so it may be
necessary to use your system suggested above as well.

> The second one is to symlink the default language filename
> to a filename without language specifier. It'd look like
> this:
>   smb.conf -> smb.conf.en

Hmm - I first thought this was a bad idea but with the right
infrastructure it could be quite good.  I think param/loadparm.c
will need to be gettext()ified for this to work nicely.

Or were you thinking of the default language for the man pages -
I was thinking of internationalising the smb.conf parameter
names.  Perhaps another project.

> He still can issue "man smb.conf" as usual, though he can
> use "man smb.conf.en".

If you use LANG=ru (or whatever) man should automatically pick up
internationalised verions of manual pages where available.

> Obviously it requires having various versions of the same
> doc file in samba source tree. It would be painful, if we
> couldn't use compression. I've checked that gziped

I wouldn't worry about the size of the tree.  We already have a
complete copy of Using Samba in there.  (-:  You can always do
'cvs -z9' when checking out or updating files.

> So, if we do support even 6 languages, it won't enlarge
> source tree too agressivly. Besides, it'd take plenty of
> time so the change would be progresive.

I'm a bit worried about how these would be kept up to date given
that we only have a couple of people working on the English
documentation let alone other languages.


Tim.