Documentation proposal

[Jannis Pohlmann]

On Mon, 4 May 2009 10:49:07 +0200
Nick Schermer <nickschermer at gmail.com> wrote:

> 2009/5/4 Jannis Pohlmann <jannis at xfce.org>:
> > I'm against too complex hooks. I also have the feeling that the good
> > old gettext translation method is not really suited for continuous
> > text. IMHO the little syntax overhead you have with reST makes .po
> > files almost pointless.
> 
> The point is tracking changes. The advantage of po files it will
> result in fuzzy or untranslated strings, for separate files you have
> to compare it with the original version. The syntax overhead is not
> the point, keeping in sync is.

I've just read Mike's mail on xfce-i18n. If translators feel that
they are more comfortable with rst2xml + xml2po + xml2rst rather than
translating the docs by creating a copy of the original english docs,
that's fine with me. I'm not (really) a translator so I'm not in the
position to make this decision - translators should decide here.

It seems complicated to me though. reST doesn't support looking up
strings from .po files AFAIK, so we'd have to deal with the 

  - the original docs
  - the XML generated with rst2xml.py (because we'll probably need it
    to generated translated docs)
  - a bunch of .po files.

And whenever we want to release or update the website we'll have to
throw the XML and .po files together to generate translated docs,
hoping that the XML is in sync with the original reST/Sphinx docs.

And then we also have screenshots or other images which need to be
created for each language. We can't fit those into .po files.

The way I see it we'd best have one person per language actively
working on translating the documentation. I'm pretty sure the
documentation will grow as soon as we have a nice environment for
them. But I'm not so sure putting all those strings into .po files is
the best way to go.

  - Jannis
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