Re: translation manuals

[Pavel Roskin <proski gnu org>]

Hello, Marco!

> I would like to start translating mcedit & mcserv manuals in italian.
> Before I start, (I've just finished the italian manual) is there anything 
> that I should do about it?
> 
> Many thanks for the beautiful work that is mc.

My first thought was that I'll rather remove mcserv from the distribution
than let somebody spend time on translating its manual instead of doing
something more useful.

I feel bad that old hacks are now "legitimized" and surrounded by 
documentation.  It's not a sign of maturity, it's a sign of stagnation.

I admit that it was my error when somebody offered help with adding sftp
protocol, and I recommended him to help with GNOME VFS instead.  Looking
at the sources of gnome-vfs-2.0.4, I see that it's too much integrated
with GNOME, so mc will stick with its VFS.  By the way, there is no sftp
in GNOME VFS, so that guy must have walked away :-(

If we had sftp support today, I would remove mcfs and mcserv immediately.  
Since fish and ftp have reliability problems rooted deeply in the
protocols (ssh is interactive by design, ftp doesn't have a standardized
listing), mcserv retains some legitimacy.

So, my answer would be - translate the mcserv manual if you won't feel bad
that mcserv disappears with its manuals at any time.  I don't even
guarantee that it will be in 4.6.0.

As for the mcedit manual, I would prefer if somebody fixed it first.  It 
has parts taken from the cooledit manual that are just too technical, and 
I'm not sure if they belong there, not to mentation that the new cooledit 
manual documents the internals of syntax highlighting much better.

Some text just doesn't sound right in English, e.g.  "mc.ini is used only
if the user _lacks_ his own ~/.mc/ini file".  I didn't specifically check
mcedit.1, but there may be factual errors as well, and they are harder to
fix once the manual is translated.

Just today I found that mc.1 was wrong in the description of
only_leading_plus_minus.  It was saying that if this option is enabled,
there is no way to use selection commands once the command line is not
empty.  In fact, there are still two ways - pressing escape before '+',
'-' or '*', and using the menu.

I fixed the English and the Russian manuals, but other translations need 
to be fixed.  They are still misleading.

I think that before translating anything, the manual should be rechecked 
and rewritten if needed.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin