Another question

[Paul W. Frields]

On Sat, 2006-02-04 at 18:37 -0600, Tommy Reynolds wrote:
> Uttered "Paul W. Frields" <stickster at gmail.com>, spake thus:
> 
> > > > Would it be easier for translators if we
> > > > moved to using "rpm-info-en.xml", "rpm-info-de.xml", etc.?  Comments
> > > > welcome. 
> > > I think it would be more intuitive... than check for comments or tags in
> > > the xml file...
> > I am having some second thoughts about this.
> >
> > Tommy normally catches me when I think up Bad Ideas, so I could be
> > wrong in thinking we need to change course.
> 
> Busted, again ;-)
> 
> I would vastly prefer to use a single rpm-info.xml file and have all
> portions of that be authoritative.  Otherwise you are faced with
> having some rpm-info files be more equal than others, on a
> stanza-by-stanza basis.  

This is far more clear than the way I stated my new misgivings.  Thanks.

> Notice in the fdpsh and Makefile.common
> changes I've just checked in there must be the notion of a "primary
> language" for a document: the locale of the original, authoritative
> rpm-info-${LANG}.xml file.  After all, not all documents will
> originate in "en", will they?  The complications and accommodations
> seem to be creeping in.  Let's stomp them out.

Agreed.  One question: why not have an authoritative "rpm-info.xml" file
just live in the doc module root?  That seems even more intuitive, so
translators need not hunt through the other modules or read Makefile
stuff to figure out where the rpm-info lives for a specific doc, in the
even that it's not "en".  Plus it gives the correct impression that it
is the One XML that rules over an entire set of translations.  Or am I
going insane again?

> My original vision was that a single rpm-info.xml file would contain
> ALL the meta-information for a document.  There didn't seem to be a
> way to have a separate ".spec" file for each language (and thus
> separate RPM's) and that implied that all the changelog activity
> could be lumped together.

Yes, although it would be possible to do separate "<doc>-*.spec" files
(with separate "rpm-info-*.xml" files), it would be clumsy, a
maintenance nightmare, and ill-advised.  Far better to wait for
documents to achieve uniformity through complete translations, and only
then roll the packages.

> BTW, I considered the "%changelog" to not strictly be an RPM or
> document ChangeLog as such, but to represent more of an event log.
> Each correction, addition, or packaging event would be recorded
> there.  Just before an RPM package release, a new RPM event would be
> added thus marking the RPM version and release.  No need to
> synchronize the document versions with the RPM versions unless
> convention dictated.

Right, it would be more of the nature of "We've made some good fixes,
they've all been translated into the target languages, time to ship an
RPM update."

> Not a course change, just a return to sanity.
> 
> You have now read my $0.02USD.  What is yours?  We await your
> pleasure.

Yes, if some additional translators (I already heard from one) would
confirm that this doesn't burden them -- remembering to put translations
in certain elements of the "rpm-info.xml" file -- that would be grand.
I will put a little bit of comment fluff in the XSL stylesheets to
indicate clearly what to translate.

Is there any standardized way for indicating parts of an XML file that
should not be translated?  Some sort of outboard configuration that is
understood by xml2po{,t}?

-- 
Paul W. Frields, RHCE                          http://paul.frields.org/
  gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233  5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
 Fedora Documentation Project: http://fedora.redhat.com/projects/docs/
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