[Padre-dev] localizing plugin documentation

[breno]

2009/4/29 Cezary Morga <cm at therek.net>:
> Dnia środa, 29 kwietnia 2009, Jerome Quelin napisał:
>> On 09/04/29 12:26 +1000, Adam Kennedy wrote:
>> > I can't think of any Perl/CPAN project that has ever tried to do i18n
>> > at this level of depth, so I'm not too worried about us just trying
>> > something, and having some false starts.
>>
>> sure
>>
>> > That said, might be interesting to ask around and see if anyone else
>> > has managed to implement anything similar.
>> >
>> > I wonder if we could just get away with something like
>> > Padre/Plugin/Foo.pm
>> > Padre/Plugin/Foo/PT.pod
>> >

I *think* POD2::Base does almost that. But I like yours better, as it
seems to scale nicer for too many pods.

>> > That said, would doing things via POD make life unusually difficult
>> > for the translators?
>
> I've used to work on translating FreeBSD documentation. It's generated from
> SGML source so some basic markup here and there is not much of a problem for
> translators and POD is basic markup.
>
>> and let's not even mention the problem of "has the pod changed since
>> last time, and where?"
>
> That's a bigger issue, though.

Maybe I'm being over simplistic here, but once (if) the POD is under
revision control in the plugin, we could diff the originals to see
where they changed, and thus know where the translation should be
updated, right? It could be automatized - and it appears such a tool
could be a great benefit for translators elsewhere, such as on the
FBSD project, as therek pointed out. But then again I'm new to this
whole translation business and might not be getting the full picture.

The idea of using gettext makes it a lot easier to do small text, but
I agree with Alias on two accounts:

- It's plugin documentation, so expected fields (specially
"description") could become large enough for gettext to be not so much
better than plain POD translation.

 - It's plugin documentation, so it can grow a lot and, if it's loaded
to memory, people who just want to use the plugin will have to cope
with the memory issues.

Whatever direction we take, I think we should try to make the plugin
documentation translation consistent with whatever way Padre is
deploying its own help/documentation content.


Cheers,

garu