International Samba

[Rafal Szczesniak]

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

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
  etc.

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

and would be probably the most often used.
Thanks to this, nothing changes from user's point of view.
He still can issue "man smb.conf" as usual, though he can
use "man smb.conf.en".

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
docs/manpages/* gives almost three times smaller
directory than left uncompressed. For
docs/docbook/manpages/* it's about 3.5.
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 waiting for comments, especially from the members of the
Team. I don't want to start coding, just for hearing that I
should throw it out of a window, after the work is done.

cheers,

Rafal 'Mimir' Szczesniak <mimir at spin.ict.pwr.wroc.pl>   |
*BSD, Linux and Samba                                  /
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