[RFC] i18n/l10n pam_winbind for samba 3.x

[Christian Perrier]

Quoting boyang (boyang at suse.de):
> Hi, everybody:
>      Does it deserve to i18n/l10n pam_winbind so that error messages and
> warnings that will be seen by user is i18n/l10ned, which makes samba
> more user-friendly.


I personnally think that any kind of i18n work in samba would be
welcome..:-)

Contrary to a wwell established legend, not all sysadmins are very
fluent in English and decent localization of software and
documentation is always a great enhancement.

When it comes at samba, I see some places where i18n would be needed:

- interactive commands: mostly 'net'. I seem to remember that some
  people mentioned they were working on it, back in Spring

- pam_winbind maybe, as you mention

- manpages. I would *love* to see smb.conf(5) translated.

- other documentations

When it comes at documentation, the key point is finding a good
system. "Just" translating the XML files (or *roff files) is mostly
useless as any further update makes the translation obsolete with no
easy way to reconcile changes. There are tools to handle such files'
translation with gettext, such as named "po4a" ("PO for anything").

With such tools, Debian translators managed to translate things as
hairy as dpkg or APT documentation, several reference manuals, etc.

Again, I'd personnally love to see more i18n in samba. As far as I
know, the only i18n'd thing is SWAT.