Re: Doc translation

On Mon, 18 Jun 2001, Peter Eisentraut wrote:

> 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.

I definitely have no problems with this ... one comment about Tom's "how
to keep releases together" point though ... that is what Tags/Branches are
for ... as long as we tag all modules, things shouldn't "fall out of sync"
...

But, if you already have a clean method of doign this, please, by all
means, continue ...