Re: Splitting up documentation/translations?

[danilo gnome org (Danilo Šegan)]

Enver, Shaun,

Today at 10:34, Enver ALTIN wrote:

> On Wed, 2004-08-11 at 20:04 -0500, Shaun McCance wrote:
>> Let's assume all the translations will be roughly equal size.  I know
>> it's a terrible assumption, but I'm lazy.  so ((1159 / 48) * 3.1M) gives
>> us nearly 75M.
>> 
>> Seventy-five megabytes!
>> 
>> At some point, we're going to have to figure out something clever forn,
>> packaging translations of documentation.
>> 
>> I don't have any objections or anything about what you're doing right
>> now.  I just thought this somewhat-related tidbit was interesting.
>
> This brings yet another question about the process of translation and/or
> documentation. I mostly use en_US and sometimes tr_TR locale so I, like
> many others, don't care if my system has translations/documentation in
> other languages.
>
> Maybe we could pack the whole translation and documentation in per-
> language modules sometime in the future. So Joe R. Hacker from foo-
> distro-gnome-team would pull those modules and pack them as .fpm
> packages, and Joe User would have only those he wants installed. I doubt
> if that would help anyone on translation of documentation teams, though.

Splittting-up documentation translations seems a hell of a lot easier
than splitting up GUI translations.  The reason is that you can
install translated documents separately — they're standalone.

With GUI stuff, you'd have to go through lot of manual tasks while
updating.  If you get a PO file (or MO file — it's easily parsed),
you need to merge translations into existing .desktop, .schemas, ...
files.  intltool-merge can do this (provided you mark _Name, _Comment,
... and similar), but you need to know which files to update.

I'll think some more about all this, but it seems many changes to the
build system will be required, so this will probably affect developers
more than it would affect translators and localizers.

Cheers,
Danilo