International Samba (fwd)

[Rafal Szczesniak]

On Fri, 10 Aug 2001, Tim Potter wrote:

> Rafal Szczesniak writes:
>
> > It seems, nobody is interested in this issue... ;-)
>
> Not true, it's just a really hard task.
>
(...)
>
> 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.

That's right. I've looked into "man man" and found some
informations, but I guess not each platform Samba supports
(it's quite a big list) has GNU man package installed.
This makes neccessary recognizing which platform we are
dealing with, essentially whether or not the GNU man is
installed.
Anybody knows how the other Samba supported platforms, like
HPUX, OpenVMS, IRIX, etc. approach to the international
software ?

>
> > 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.

Well ... I was afraid it could be interpreted in this way.
Internationalising the parameter names is something I'd
rather be very careful of. I'm afraid it would introduce
much unneccessary confusion...
Instead, I was also thinking about international messages
(do not confuse it with logfiles, this would be almost
impossible) like displayed after issuing "smbclient -h"
(or "help" on smbclient cmd prompt).

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

I have no illusions. It will be impossible to have each
language version up to date all the time. My (polish)
versions already needs work after a few changes in 2.2.1 and
new Jerry's parameter "lanman printing only" (or sth like
this...). Fortunately, once translated (the big job, I can
assure you ;-) ), documentation requires much much less work
on maintenace.
Another problem is how to translate them to other languages
(like french, german, perhaps spanish ...). Or rather, how
to gain volunteers for this task ... It will be very long
term process.


cheers,

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