Re: [perldoc2-developers] General Questions

[Joergen W. L. <joe...@gm...>]

Hi everybody,

sorry for being so quiet over the weekend. I was attending to my other 
job as a musician. Just back this morning 04:30 CET. Had to get some sleep.

I will try to answer/comment on your postings as neccessary over the 
next couple of days, so please stay tuned.

Robert 'phaylon' Sedlacek schrieb:
> Good evening again, everyone;
> 
> If I understood Joergen correctly at the last Hamburg.pm meeting, he's
> going to write up a specification on what the application should be doing,
> on the workflows and what the overall ideas are. So this is just a bunch
> of general questions I'd like to bring into discussion.

Correct. I have scheduled the write-up for today.

> * Service or Application?
> 
> Is the application itself thought as a service to the perl community,
> hosted probably under the *.perl.org domain space, or should we focus on
> building a standalone-capable application and tools to work with it? As a
> simple service focused on translation of the perl documentation, it is
> probably easier to handle, but the standalone package way would also have
> some advantages. Especially that other projects can use this technology
> for providing a translation facility for their documentations. I'd think
> of things like Plagger, Catalyst, DBIx-Class and other projects with a
> potentially large international target group. This might also have some
> implications on the spec though, as a method to refactor larger parts of
> the docbase might be helpful, even if perldoc itself is not really
> affected by this phenomenon.

The initial idea was to have a platform dedicated mainly (but not 
exclusively) to the perl community. So to prepare the project for future 
growth and extensibility it is probably the wiser choice to go more for 
the "application" way of things.

I think, generally it is a good idea to be as open to other projects as 
possible. On the other hand, there is Rosetta 
(https://launchpad.net/rosetta) which aims at more or less the same 
goals (and also uses gettext/.po). It already has a huge user/translator 
base plus *very* solid funding. Rosetta is part of the Ubuntu project.

The major difference between Rosetta and our project is our focus on 
documentation rather than dialogues, program messages, etc.

Having said this, I guess that Rosetta can still be a good source of 
inspiration. Analyzing their approach is another piece of work I will 
have to do...

As for the hosting I agree with ask Bjoern Hansen who is responsible for 
perl.org. He said:

   "I think the *.perldoc.perl.org sites should be the
    finished copy for end-users in all cases though;
    the translation tools can run anywhere."

(I was asking about a possibility to have language specific subdomains 
like 'fr.perldoc.perl.org')

Interestingly enough we actually have a working platform already: the 
SVN repository on sourceforge. It is just not really useable by 'end 
users', aka translators.

Frank Seitz of Hamburg.pm suggested a while ago a database driven 
approach. That might be more maintainable/extensible than the SVN-based 
approach.

Any SQL experts around?

> * Which Platform?
> 
> This question is rather web-development-wise. Personally, I'm pretty much
> favoring Catalyst these days. But I might be the only one accustomed to
> this framework in here. As I see it, there would be various possibilities
> (Catalyst, Maypole, Jifty, CGI-Application, plain CGI, and probably
> others). So, what's the plan in this regards, and how do you guys see
> this?

As the platform (or - at least the 'interface') will be mostly web-based 
this is going to be a key decision. I think the choice should be based 
on the following:

- extensibility
   (add natural and programming languages, subprojects...)
- maintainability
   (database, forums, resources)
- security
   (the more people use it, the bigger the chance that someone
   breaks it accidentally)
- stableness
   (same as above)
- simpleness
   (both in structure as in useability)

> Ok, it's been just two questions, but maybe someone else has something to
> add :)

Only two - but two *very important* questions. Thanks, Robert.

As I said, I will try to come up with some ideas by tomorrow.

Greetings to y'all,

Joergen