Date: Thu, 18 Nov 1999 08:09:01 +0000 From: Nik Clayton <nik@freebsd.org> To: Chris Costello <chris@calldei.com> Cc: Alexey Zelkin <phantom@cris.net>, Jun Kuriyama <kuriyama@sky.rim.or.jp>, doc@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: FAQ notes. Message-ID: <19991118080901.B93488@kilt.nothing-going-on.org> In-Reply-To: <19991117154536.J7229@holly.calldei.com>; from Chris Costello on Wed, Nov 17, 1999 at 03:45:36PM -0600 References: <19991115164146.I548@holly.calldei.com> <14385.25598.916085.72159A@localhost.sky.rim.or.jp> <19991116081420.R548@holly.calldei.com> <19991117205251.C17330@scorpion.crimea.ua> <19991117154536.J7229@holly.calldei.com>
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On Wed, Nov 17, 1999 at 03:45:36PM -0600, Chris Costello wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 17, 1999, Alexey Zelkin wrote:
> > I really don't see enough reasons to split faq into chapters.
> > What purpose of the splitting ? I see only one reason for now -- make
> > a lot of additional work for translators :-)
>
> It's more organized.
>
> > Also I quite sure that you have to do structural and content
> > changes separately. (Hope you don't forget about translators).
>
> It should be treated as a rewrite.
Please don't. To do this so it's as painless as possible for the
translators, we (i.e., you :-) ) should be:
1. Block out a new structure for the FAQ. It looks like you've got
that far.
2. Transferring content from the old structure to the new structure
wholesale. The commit messages for this should give precise details
about what was copied where: "Copied paragraphs 1 thru 4 of the
foo-bar section in to the middle of foo-bar/chapter.sgml." That
way the translators can mirror your actions.
3. Rewriting text in separate commits.
This is pretty much how the Handbook conversion to DocBook went, with me
annotating what I did in a README file as I went (with appropriate command
lines, or Emacs Lisp fragments to carry out what I did) for the translators.
Asking our translation teams to re-translate the FAQ from scratch is, IMHO,
asking for far too much of their time and effort.
I don't mean to sound negative. The FAQ needs work doing to it, and it's
great that someone's now putting their name to that work. But we don't want
to be in a situation where we have a spiffy new English FAQ while the
translations lag far behind.
N
--
If you want to imagine the future, imagine a tennis shoe stamping
on a penguin's face forever.
--- with apologies to George Orwell
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