International Samba (fwd)

Deniz Akkus Kanca deniz at arayan.com
Thu Aug 9 19:48:40 GMT 2001


Man understands the default $LANG parameter for internationalization. Ie, if
LANG=fr, it will look for the man page first under fr/.... , if it can't
find it, it will look in the default location, ie English. This is explained
in the man page, so man man. (I use man-1.5i-8) So, the man page still has
the same name under any language, that is, smb.conf.1, but each language
gets installed into a separate man directory, depending on the language.

Apache also understands multilingual documents:  index.en.html,
index.fr.html etc. Depending on what the default language of the browser is,
it pulls up the appropriate one.

Please do not make up yet another "standard" for obtaining multilingual
documentation. Multilingual support is sketchy enough so that no one would
find it if it were put in a non-standard location/name.  Man and the apache
webserver both have a way of understanding the language the system is
configured for and do the right thing.

Best regards,
Deniz


----- Original Message -----
From: "Gerald Carter" <gcarter at valinux.com>
To: "Rafal Szczesniak" <mimir at spin.ict.pwr.wroc.pl>
Cc: <samba-technical at lists.samba.org>
Sent: Thursday, August 09, 2001 10:11 PM
Subject: Re: International Samba (fwd)


> [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
>  ---------------------------------------------------------------------
>  www.valinux.com         VA Linux Systems       gcarter_at_valinux.com
>  www.samba.org              SAMBA Team              jerry_at_samba.org
>  www.plainjoe.org                                jerry_at_plainjoe.org
>  --"I never saved anything for the swim back." Ethan Hawk in Gattaca--
>
>
>






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