International Samba (fwd)

[Rafal Szczesniak]

Forwarded to samba-technial as Jerry suggested.


---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 7 Aug 2001 23:26:55 +0200 (CEST)
From: Rafal Szczesniak <mimir at spin.ict.pwr.wroc.pl>
To: samba-docs at lists.samba.org
Subject: International Samba

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 3.5 times or so.
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                                  /
______________________________________________________/


Further explanation that came to my mind this time:
 1. Config-time parameters obviously don't have to have
    these names. It a loose proposal.
 2. We don't have to be afraid of rapidly growing source
    tree size. The biggest documentation file is
    (guess what ?) smb.conf(5). I don't think there're many
    people crazy like me, to translate it to their native
    language. If we got it in 4 languages in 1 year, it
    would be the miracle...


I hope this time it will meet more positive response. What
I'm saying ? ... ANY response will be better than the last
time.