[drupal-devel] Help system redesign

[Grugnog]

On 9/25/05, Gabor Hojtsy <gabor at hojtsy.hu> wrote:
> This is all possible with CVS, but of course CVS is not easy enough for
> quite some folks. You get commit messages exactly as you described, plus
> you have version control, which is already proven. Using simple text
> files (PO files) the diffs are even easier to read then those XML files,
> you reindent, and all the lines suddenly changed. It is unfortunate,
> that CVS is not easy for quite some people, but IMHO it does not mean we
> should create a whole new system. The Tortoise tools for Windows are
> quite good in simlifying CVS/SVN.
>
[snip]
> Not that we have no need to deal with international charsets, as we only
> support utf8, nothing else. PO editors do utf8 well. Let us know the
> advantages of switching formats, switching desktop tools, writing new
> import/export code along your suggestion please.

I don't think there is any need to abandon PO as a format for
translators to work in. My main point was that if the text is going to
be moved to the database (as per the original suggestion) then an
online translation tool is an obvious next step (see below). We would
have to write import code to import the existing translations anyhow!

As for XML, I just wanted to point out that a standard already exists,
and we should avoid making up our own (if we choose to support XML
import/export) unless there are good reasons. I don't have much
knowledge (or opinions) about about PO vs. XLIFF, but
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-i18n/2003-October/msg00032.html
seems to have some interesting points.

> What is not possible
> now? What is going to be better?

I think you explained it yourself in your first paragraph. The
technical hurdles to learning translation tools and CVS are quite
high. While there is no problem with what we have now (other than
suggested in the Larry's original summary) there are always
non-technical people who want to contribute to open source projects,
and translation is an ideal opportunity to allow this. I feel that
having the option of using a web-based tool to allow this is good. If
I18N is important to Drupal (and it obviously widens the potential
market) then the volume of translation will have to increase
exponentially, and hence the more accessible we can make the
translation the better.

- Grug