[D-I Manual] Important information for translators

[Frans Pop <aragorn@tiscali.nl>]

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Hello all,

As you may know, the start of initrd builds for RC2 is planned for Okt 8.
I have only this evening learned that the official build of the manual 
currently takes place at the same time.
!! This would only give you one day (until about *02:00 UTC tomorrow*) to
!! make sure your translation is up-to-date and builds OK.
This is especially important as it is very likely RC2 will ship with Sarge.

Unfortunately, I did not know this when I committed my changes today.
I hope you will be able to get translations up-to-date with these changes 
today (most important is fixing gpl.xml).
If you'd like to discuss something or if you'd like a test build done, you can 
reach me tomorrow from about 10:00 UTC by mail or on IRC (#debian-boot).

Looking at the status now, I think cs, ja, pt_BR and maybe fr and es 
translations could be included on the Sarge installation CD's.
I feel the other translations should be made available on the internet for 
on-line reading and download.

I have asked Joey Hess to see if it will be possible to give us more time, and 
he's looking into that.

There have been some major developments regarding the manual recently. More 
about these below, but first a status overview.

<translation status overview>
These languages look to be missing only the most recent updates:
cs, fr, ja, pt_BR
(congratulations to gleydson for getting pt_BR done in such short time)

More or less complete translations:
cs - complete
es - mostly complete but quite a few files out-of-date
fr - mostly complete, some errors that need fixing
ja - complete
pt_BR - looks to be complete and up-to-date; some files (about 30)
        marked "untranslated" even though they are
        (use ./scripts/doc-check -s to list these)

Incomplete, (almost) up-to-date:
nl - at 25%, up-to-date
ru - % unknown 

Not considered for inclusion in Sarge:
ca - translation below 25%
da - not maintained
de - out-of-date, not maintained
el - translation below 25%
eu - translation below 25%
it - translation below 25%
</translation status overview>


At the Oldenburg meeting last month, Nikolai Prokoschenko and I have made a 
lot of progress on creating ps and pdf variants [1] of the manual using free 
tools. We have also been making progress on using po files for translation.
This is currently being tested and finalized into a new build system.
Expect further info soon.

Also at Oldenburg, I went through the i386 variant of the manual with Joey 
Hess. The changes I did today were the first results of that meeting.

We also discussed a restructuring of chapter 2 to be more of a general 
introductory overview of d-i; this could even largely replace the current 
HOWTO appendix.
The new setup for chapter 2 would be:
  2.1 Introduction
  2.2 Supported architectures
  2.3 Installation levels (priority, boot params, automatic installation)
  2.4 Installation methods
  2.5 System requirements (containing most of the current info in ch. 2)
I was planning to work on this next, but will postpone until it is clear what 
the timeline is for the manual for Sarge.

We also discussed moving some info on installing on older i386 hardware to the 
appendix 'Random bits'.

A next step would be an integration of chapters 4 and 5 with separate 
paragraphs per installation method.

Comments welcome!

Cheers,
Frans Pop

[1] We have this working very well for the Roman and Cyrillic alphabets,
    but will need help for Japanese and Greek.
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