Debian Edu ITIL documentation in English - finally
Many years ago, the Norwegian part of the Debian Edu project wrote a
manual on how to set up a support organisation for remotely
administrating a Debian edu installation. Sadly, the manual was written
in Norwegian, and fell behind as very fewer and fewer active people in
the project could read and write Norwegian. The original Norwegian
document had heaps of information since integrated into the release
manual, but there are still large parts that are still valid today on
how to organize and plan large scale deployment of Debian Edu. There
were also large parts that were obsolete.
Thus authum, during the developer gatherings in Oslo, we discussed what
we could do about it, and after the debian-edu-doc documentation finally
was completely translated to Norwegian Bokmål a month ago, we decided to
fix this.
The simple plan was to convert the Norwegian moinmoin wiki pages to
docbook XML, transform that to PO files for translation, translate the
texts to English, create new English moinmoin pages using the docbook
XML and the PO translation, and upload the new English version to
wiki.debian.org for future maintanence of the document. The nb->en po
file would be reverset (into a en->nb po file) to get an up to date
Norwegian translation too.
We dropped a few large sections of obsolete text to reduce the amount of
wasted translation, but there is still some outdated parts left. The
plan is to update this in the English version and update the manual to
reflect the current state of the system, as well as drop those parts
that are now documented in the release manual.
The original document were written using OpenOffice.org. Those files
are still available from
<URL: http://developer.skolelinux.no/itil/oldindex.html >. After this,
the text were lifted from the ODF files (using HTML export and pandoc,
if I remember correctly) and stored in wiki/moinmoin format as
<URL: http://wiki.skolelinux.no/Dokumentasjon/ITIL > There it rested
many years until we decided to copy the files to
<URL: https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/nb/ITIL/ > to
make sure we could export them as docbook XML.
The migration from Norwegian wiki to English wiki is done using the git
repository available from
<URL: http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/debian-edu/upstream/debian-edu-itil-doc-nb.git/ >
and the translation is done using Transifex on
<URL: https://www.transifex.com/projects/p/itil-revitalization/ >.
The Norwegian wiki and the PO file fetched from Transifex is combined
and the end result is uploaded as
<URL: https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/en/ITIL/ > (using
'make push-en' from the git source).
When we are done translating and reviewing the result, the final resting
place for the English document will be
<URL: https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/ITIL/ >. The
Norwegian wikis (both on wiki.debian.org and wiki.skolelinux.no) will be
removed, and the Norwegian version will be maintained as po files
instead.
We hope the new English ITIL document from wiki.debian.org will be
included in the debian-edu-doc package when we are done. The ITIL
manual used to be included in debian-edu-doc but were removed some years
ago, because it was out of date and had build problems - in addition to
the problem of being Norwegian only and thus almost completely gibberish
to the debian-edu-doc maintainers.
At the moment the translation is 94% done (only the appendix with the
contract proposal remain) and the review is 19% done. More reviewers
and translators would be great. If you want to contribute, visit the
Transifex URL mentioned above and select the 'join team' link.
I wish to send my thanks to all the people involved with writing,
transforming and translating this manual! I am very grateful!
--
Happy hacking
Petter Reinholdtsen
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