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Re: doc-base: documentation in different languages

Neil Williams wrote: 
On Thu, 13 Sep 2007 13:18:00 +0200 (CEST)
"Jan-Pascal van Best" <janpascal@vanbest.org> wrote:
  
Sure. But what I was trying to ask, can I tell doc-base that these are
really the same information but in different languages, so that when a
French user browses the doc base, he or she sees the French version, while
all others see only the English version?
    
1. If this is gnome-related, use gnome-doc-tools and scrollkeeper. That
involves rewriting the docs in docbook / XML.
It's a Java library, so it's definitely not gnome-related.
2. If your .doc package can depend on dwww, then you could use some
form of scripting. PHP can do it, perl can do it, even _javascript_ can
have a go at it. Using PHP etc. could get tricky as you are relying on
the user having not just http://localhost but a working PHP install too.
For a Java library this would be going way too far.
AFAICT doc-base is not i18n-aware. IMHO it does not need to be aware
either. doc-base simply registers documentation for use by other tools.
It is up to those other tools whether and how to support i18n and l10n.
Well, yes, but how can those other tools know that two documents are really the same in another language if that information is not stored in doc-base somehow?
If you want automation, use i18n-aware tools as in Gnome (and I suspect
in KDE too). Using gnome-help, yelp, scrollkeeper or something similar
is the standard method but it requires upstream cooperation.
I'm not installing a help viewing system, I'm just registering documentation with the Debian documentation repository. Currently, doc-base supports multiple versions of the same document in other formats (such as HTML, PDF) and I guess the front-ends would decide which version to show. I would like the same kind of behaviour for multiple translations of the same document, but it seems doc-base does not support that. I could register all translations as separate documents. With only English and French, that would not be too bad, but if a document would be available in 50 languages, the documentation index would be polluted severely.

Cheers

Jan-Pascal

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