Re: Sun contributed l10n documentation

[danilo gnome org (Danilo Šegan)]

Hi Young Joo,

Yesterday at 13:27, Young Joo Pintaske wrote:

> A few days ago a colleague wrote a blog:
> http://blogs.sun.com/calum/date/20061101
>
> There he refers to IRC conversation about l10n docs that Sun contributed
> a while ago and that they were useless because of the imcompatible file
> format.

They were not useless.  And my full reply about how to go about
reusing them was in
  http://blogs.gnome.org/view/calum/2006/11/01/0#comments

The only problem was that we had to "dump" them from being used as
even partial translations simply because with SGML/XML, it was all or
nothing (i.e. outdated complete translation vs. up-to-date incomplete
translation, what we'd prefer).

> Please forgive my ignorance in the Gnome community process. Which file
> formats are acceptable to the community? I'd like to understand
> precisely what the issue was, and how we can resolve it going forward.
> Your comments are appreciated. :-)

We have since switched to using gettext PO format for documentation
translation, since this was the only thing we had appropriate
infrastructure for (well, we developed it :).

The only thing we had from Sun was pure SGML/XML docs, and it's not
trivial to update them when something changes in the original.  So,
one needs to switch to some other format.  That's why I added the "-r"
(from "reuse") option to xml2po: so anyone familiar with the language
translation is in can adjust the structure in files to be the same,
and then just create PO files.

So, we have not lost all of Sun's translations, it's just that we have
lost those nobody has converted over (as I said, it's not too simple
to migrate them, though it's not too hard).  And truth be told, we
have not lost them either, they are just waiting to be converted.
When someone comes up wanting to continue translation, it's still a
good idea to start with Sun translations, but that will only happen
when someone interested in those languages shows up.

Cheers,
Danilo