installing translated docs

[John Fleck <jfleck inkstain net>]

Folks -

We now have the embarassment of riches associated with the large
quantity of translated documentation provided by the Sun team.[1]

The normal procedure is to include them in the tarball and install them
alongside the normal gnome/help/appname/C/ directory used by the English
documentation,so the German, for example, would go in
gnome/help/appname/de/, etc.

The large number of translations being provided, however, will add
substantially to the size of the tarballs. For gnome-utils, as one
example, the tarball will grow by approximately 600k. Eye of GNOME, as
another example, will grow by more than 200k, according to Mike Lei, who
is working on getting the translations installed. The Users' Guide with
all the translations included would be larger than the Koender's pig[2].

Is there an alternative that would allow users to pull down
tarballs only for their language of choice, or does that create too
complex a management problem?

KDE apparently had or has "language support packages" that included 
localized docs.[3]

Has this already been thought through?

Cheers,
John

[1] See http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-doc-list/2002-September/msg00039.html
for previous, inconclusive discussion of this issue.
[2] http://www.cyberbeach.net/~solonyka/LCRA/pig.htm
[3] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-doc-list/2002-September/msg00044.html
-- 
John Fleck
jfleck inkstain net (h) jfleck abqjournal com (w)
http://www.inkstain.net http://www.abqjournal.com

"Sometimes, a diner is all about the mac and cheese." 
  - Zippy the Pinhead