Re: Doc translation

Tatsuo Ishii writes:

> Hi, some PostgreSQL users in Japan have been translating 7.1 docs into
> Japanese. I hope the work would finish within 1-2 months. My question
> is how the translated docs could be merged into the doc source tree
> once it is done. Maybe doc/ja/src/sgml?

A while ago I sent a proposal to -docs about how to handle this (basically
doc/src/sgml-<lang>).  No one protested so I was going to implement it; in
fact, I already have in some private branch I have lying around here.  It
even includes some nice side-effects, such as fallback to English for
incomplete translations (so you can look at the result while translation
is still going on) and the integration of the translated SQL reference
pages with the internationalized psql that is currently taking shape.
(Someone else is working on a French translation and has been very anxious
for this to happen, too.)

I would not be in favour of a separate CVS module, for several reasons:
First, it will marginalize the efforts.  I bet there are a sufficient
number of people how would be willing to track documentation upgrades and
keep their language up-to-date.  Second, the build machinery would get
gratuitously complicated and spread around (makefiles, stylesheets,
graphics, URL strings, etc.).  Third, the (undoubtedly real) problem of
keeping these translations up to date would not be helped by this at all.
The maintainers of these translations will simply have to be honest to not
label their documentation set as corresponding to version X.Y when the
content is still based on the original documentation for X.(Y-2).

About "I don't want to download all this stuff I can't read":  We already
have chunked distribution tarballs.  It would be possible to "chunk out"
the files pertaining to a particular language (which would include the
message catalogs as well).

While other open source projects sometimes keep their entire documentation
in a separate cvs module, they generally keep all languages together for
the reasons given above.

-- 
Peter Eisentraut   peter_e@gmx.net   http://funkturm.homeip.net/~peter