International Samba (fwd)

[Gerald Carter]

[For those that aren't aware of it.  Rafal
 recently sent me a polish translation of the 2.2.0
 man pages in SGML. :-)  And hence our conversation
 here...]



Rafal,

I'm going to back up a little and pose the question
of "What is the best way to maintain multiple
language versions of the same docs?"
Particularly, I'm curious about the generation
of the various formats (nroff, html, etc...)
Doesn't Apache do this?  Anyone know?

If people would examine the docs/docbook/
subdirectory and make suggestions or submit
patches Rafal and I would appreciate it greatly.

btw...For installation, the proposal below
sounds acceptable to me.

more comments inline....



cheers, jerry


On Thu, 9 Aug 2001, Rafal Szczesniak wrote:

> 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".

This sounds workable.

> 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.

Don't worry about space in the CVS tree.  We
can compress these for installation though on
platforms which work with that.

> 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.

Good thinking.  Thanks for beinging this up.





cheers, jerry
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 www.valinux.com         VA Linux Systems       gcarter_at_valinux.com
 www.samba.org              SAMBA Team              jerry_at_samba.org
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