Re: How to insert GPL-text into gcmd documentation

[Petr Kovar <pmkovar gnome org>]

Hi Uwe,

On Sat, 4 Feb 2017 20:47:55 +0100
Uwe Scholz <u scholz83 gmx de> wrote:

> Hi Gnome translators,
>
> I currently updated Gnome Commander to use the "New Documentation
> Infrastructure" (*) using yelp. The Gnome Commander documentation is
> still written in DocBook format.
>
> I decided to include the text of GPLv2 in the docu and did this by
> saving the official GPLv2 docbook text (**) in legal.xml and inserting
> it in index.docbook by the line
>
> <xi:include href="legal.xml" xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude"/> 
>
> My question to you is: Is this the right way to include the GPL
> text into the documentation of Gnome Commander? Will it lead to
> problems for the translators? Or is there another, official way of
> doing that? 

I think that itstool will pick up the strings from legal.xml just fine but
it's a lot of extra strings for translation. IANAL but maybe you could just
include a standard legal notice there, such as:

This manual is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free
Software Foundation...

I see you already distribute the full text of the license in
https://github.com/gcmd/gnome-commander/blob/master/COPYING.

Note that the standard license for GNOME docs is not GPL, which is better
suited for code, but Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported.
 
> Thanks for any advice on this. You can find the current status of my
> work here: https://github.com/gcmd/gnome-commander/tree/use-yelp/doc/C

Looking at https://github.com/gcmd/gnome-commander/tree/use-yelp/doc/C,
I'm wondering, would it be better to move releases.xml into a separate
document? Such as Release Notes? Again, that would save translators
interested in translating the manual only lots of work.

Thanks,
pk