Re: [perldoc2-developers] datase vs. versioning

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

Hi,

Sorry for being late with my reply. I'm working on the german 
translation of the "CSS Cookbook" for O'Reilly. That eats a lot of my time.

The Actual Subject

Specifically there is one point I did not think of:

There should be versioning/a backup facility for the translations. Which 
more or less means a combination of a database-based storage for recent 
versions and a SVN repository (which we already have!) as a 
"backend-backend". (...unless we wanted to re-implement versioning 
within the DB.)

Generic/Specific Framework

The focus should stay on the translation of the perl documentation for 5 
and 6. If there is a chance to build it so it allows future extensions 
for other languages - fine. If not we should not worry too much.

Pootle/Transdict/Rosetta

I had a closer look at Pootle and Transdict. Especially Transdict looked 
interesting at first glance since it's written in Perl. I thought it 
might serve as a starting point but the coding appears to be dating back 
to Perl 4 with hardly any documentation/comments in the code. The 
application is based on .cgi files that have to be in the document 
root... Nah. Rather not.

Pootle appeared to promising but didn't want to install on my 
Debian/Sarge machine without a kernel change or a lot of manual 
instllation. Or does it make more sense to just use that? I'm still not 
100% sure.

Also, since it's written Python, changes, alterations, extensions would 
not be as easy for us as with our "native" language, Perl. Apart from 
that, if we used Pootle, we would loose the "promotion" effect.

But I learned a few important lessons from their approach:

- document as much as you can
- don't announce or link to features that are not there, yet

Their specification is very well organized and will definitely be a good 
source of inspiration for the perldoc 2.0 spec 0.3.

So much for now,
will be back, soon with more info,

Joergen


Nicolas François schrieb:
> Hi,
> 
> Just a note about the specifications.
> 
> Building a generic translation framework is something quite
> difficult, and other projects are already working on it: Rosetta,
> Pootle, Transdict, etc.
> 
> IIRC, the specifications for Rosetta are publicly available (but the 
> implementation is not free). The Pootle's specifications are publicly
>  available 
> (http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/wordforge/functional_specificaions)
> 
> 
> They may be worth reading if you want to build a translation 
> infrastructure .
> 
> Best Reagrds,