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D-I Manual -- Status update



Contents
========
- Sarge branch in SVN repository
- D-I repository moved from Alioth to Costa
- New Chinese and Tagalog translations
- Translations that need update (!!)
- Recent and planned changes
- Manual also available in PDF and text format
- Publication of the manual on the official Debian website
- Using po files for translation


Sarge branch in SVN repository
==============================
Joey Hess has created a 'Sarge' branch for Debian Installer ([1] and [2]). 
This also includes the manual. After a short discussion on debian-boot, 
it's been decided to continue writing and translation for the manual in 
'trunk'.
As the manual that is included on CD's and the official website will be 
built from the Sarge branch, I periodically copy all changes in trunk to 
the Sarge branch. To make this possible we will postpone adding 
documentation for post-Sarge developments (like localechooser) in d-i.

This means that writers and translators can keep working in trunk and 
don't have to worry about the Sarge branch.
The development version of the manual on [3] is built from trunk.

Repository move
===============
The SVN repository for d-i has been moved from Alioth to Costa [4].
Instructions on how to switch your checkout are in [5].
The repository can now be browsed using WebSVN from [6].

New translations
================
A new translation for Tagalog has been started recently.
Googling recently unexpectedly turned up a fully translated simplified 
Chinese translation of the manual [7].

Translations that need update
=============================
Japanese:   32 out of date; 2 missing
Spanish:    35 out of date; 2 missing
Catalan:    36 out of date; 2 missing
Italian:    72 out of date; 2 missing
Portuguese: 74 out of date; 2 missing
Basque: 85 out of date; 2 missing; 2 with missing/wrong revision comments

German, French, Japanese and Dutch are completely up-to-date.
Czech only misses the most recent changes.

Please try to keep your translations up-to-date. This is especially 
important for Portuguese and Spanish as these will be included on the 
Sarge CD's. The final build of d-i for Sarge still has to happen!

For incomplete languages: please also keep untranslated documents 
up-to-date (the cp-untranslated script can help).

Recent changes
==============
- Updates for Alfa and Sparc architectures
- Improved readability of preseeding example (long lines have been split)
- Improved documentation on resizing partitions
- Collin Watson has restructured the sections on booting from USB sticks
  and added a information on this subject for powerpc.
  This has added 2 documents.
- Frans Pop has done a revision of how <informalexamples> were being used
  and formatted. This has changed a lot of documents, but got rid of some
  unwanted whitespace in the output and improved consistency.

Planned changes
===============
- Major change of some entities used in the manual [8].
  This has been discussed on debian-boot to allow translation of entities
  [9] and to better support changing the names of the distribution and
  releases for derived distributions.
  This change will mean a lot of small updates in most documents. The
  current entities will remain supported to allow a gradual transition.
- There is still the planned major revision of chapter 2.

Manual also available in PDF and text format
============================================
We have recently switched to what was called the 'new generation' build 
scripts. This means we are now also able to generate PDF, PS and text 
versions of the manual.

Nikolai Prokoschenko is working on a further change that will also allow 
generation of a PDF version for Japanese and improve the Russian version.
This should also be of interest for the Chinese translation and should 
allow future translations in other character sets (like Greek) to be 
supported. More information will follow.

Publication of the manual on the official Debian website
========================================================
There have been some discussions [10] with people from debian-www about 
publication of the manual on the official website (linked from the Sarge 
release page [11]). It looks like most things have been worked out and 
hopefully publication will happen soon.
Special thanks to Frank Lichtenheld.

The version of the manual that is published on the official website will 
be updated periodically and new languages can be added there.

Using po files for translation
==============================
The Russian translation is currently using po files for their translation 
of the manual. Scripts have been developed to create pot files, convert 
existing translations to po files and generate xml files from the po 
files (see the scripts directory in SVN).
What still needs to be done is to integrate these scripts into the build 
system and to create a web page with translation statistics.
It also has to be decided how to save the po files in the repository and 
if the translated xml files can then be removed.

A requirement for switching to po files is that the translation has to be 
up-to-date (not necessarily complete) and that the structure of the 
translation has to be identical to the English version (there can be no 
extra paragraphs for instance).

Please let me know if you are interested in using po files for your 
translation. If there is a lot of interest, we can maybe give this a bit 
more priority.

[1]  http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2004/11/msg01344.html (branch)
[2]  http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2004/11/msg00832.html (branch)
[3]  http://d-i.alioth.debian.org/manual/
[4]  http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2004/12/msg01153.html (repo move)
[5]  http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2004/12/msg00011.html
[6]  http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/d-i
[7]  http://softforge.3322.org/d-i-manual/
[8]  http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2004/12/msg00973.html (ents)
[9]  http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2004/12/msg00610.html
[10] http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2004/12/msg00605.html (www)
[11] http://www.debian.org/releases/testing/

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