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Re: Translating the documentation outside the server



> Javier Fdz-Sanguino Pen~a wrote:
> 	I'm talking about ANY documentation that can be accesed through the
> Debian www pages.
> 
Web pages get onto the site in a number of ways
 - compiled from .wml
   No problem here.

 - generated by scripts (Packages pages, people.html)
   If a translation is sent to me, I can modify a script to generate different
   languages.

   The Packages pages are a pain. I'd prefer to have them served dynamically but
   there is resistance to that. The pages are already 20MB and I'd like to have
   them in multiple languages, have the user provide the prefered download site
   once and all pages would then use that site, and let the user pick the distribution
   (they are currently x86 only). Either we generate a large number of pages
   which get mirrored and use a redirection script to have the person use
   the proper site (they'd have to pick the mirror on every pages) or have the
   pages served dynamically.

 - mirrored from another site (consultants page)
   These should get put under CVS so they can be translated

   *** DOC People Read This ***
 - documentation mirrored from the archive
   Every important piece of documentation should be under CVS and have a mechanism
   for translation. These are generally in SGML so they can produce different
   kinds of output. Currently the versions in the archive are in english only
   and use the extension .html . Since we want to make translations available
   we need to work out a mechanism to get them with .html.lang (or .lang.html)
   extensions. This could cause some problems with accessing the pages as
   discussed below.

> 	In order for me to explain myself I give an example.
> 	I want to translate the FAQ (actually Enrique Zanardi has coordinate
> the translation :) into spanish. And I see it is pointed by from the index
> page at the Documentation Project to the directory FAQ. This makes it
> available at www.debian.org/doc/FAQ. Now, there is no directory
> /webml/english/doc/FAQ under the CVSROOT, what happened if I added the
> translation in /webml/spanish/doc/FAQ and changed the name of sgml from 
> debian-faq.sgml to debian-faq.sgml.es ?
> 	Would content-negotiation hold? Would it break the current scheme?
> 
I don't think sgml belongs under /cvs/webwml. Let's look at the case of
renaming .html files though.

This will work most of the time. When does it fail? If the users prefered
language is not available and there is no <file>.html (the backup)
then there are problems. To avoid this there are links from <file>.html ->
<file>.html.en on the site so apache will serve the english file as a
backup. We just need to make sure that this link exists for every content
negotiated page.

Jay Treacy


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